10.8 NORMAL WORKING DAYS AND PUBLIC HOLIDAYS

A firm needs to establish tables that informs it of:

• The various public holidays that apply across the globe. On these days stock exchanges and the banking systems in the countries concerned will be closed, so that no trades can settle. Note that in most jurisdictions there are very few public holidays that close exchanges or banking systems to large transactions. Although Italy, for example, had 11 public holidays in total in 2007, only two of those – 1 January and 25 December – were days on which the banking system was closed to transactions of this type.

In older investment industry applications, public holidays were traditionally associated with either currencies or countries, but this relationship is now considered over-rigid in the design of investment industry applications, as the following example will show.