When is the market open today?

You count the hours of buying and selling as though the hours themselves were yours to own. But I tell you, the kingdom is like a merchant who found one pearl of great price and sold all he had - and he did not wait for the bell to ring before he rejoiced. What does it profit a man to know the opening hour if he does not know the hour of his own reckoning?

The merchant opens his stall and closes it by the sun, and this is the measure God has set in the world - but know that the truest accounting is not written in gold, for usury and deceit are hateful before the Lord. Deal honestly in the marketplace, weigh with the just balance, and give the worker his wage before the sweat dries on his brow. The Day of Judgment comes at an hour no man knows, when no ledger shall be hidden - and on that day the scales will not care whether you traded till three.

You ask when the market opens, but a wiser question is why you cling to the opening at all - for attachment to gain is the root of suffering, and the bell that starts the trading is also the bell that starts your craving. The market opens at half past eight and closes at three, yet the mind that watches it never finds rest. Let go of the ticker's rise and fall, and you will know a stillness no closing bell can disturb.

Remember that you were slaves in Egypt, and no man set your hours for you but the taskmaster with his lash. Now the Lord has given you six days for your labor and one for rest, and this is the whole law of all your trading: deal justly, keep honest scales, and do not grind the poor under your weights. Whether your counting-house opens at dawn or noon matters little to the Almighty - what matters is whether the widow and the stranger are dealt with fairly within it.

The trader who rises early and greets his ledger with a sincere heart will not err in the hour of his labor. But tell me, does he count his coins with humanity, or only with greed? The market opens when men agree it opens, and a house without trust is open by name alone.

You ask of hours as though the hour were yours to command. Brethren, do you not know that the day of the Lord comes as a thief, and that no man knows the hour - not the merchant, not the magistrate, not the Caesar who stamps his face on the coin? Whether the market opens or stays shut, let each one work out his own salvation with fear and trembling, and owe no man anything but love.

I left my father's house and my own country not knowing where the road would end, and no man paid me for the going. You want an hour and a price; I ask instead who told you the harvest is yours to command, and whether your hand or Another's holds the tally. Go and gather what is yours, but do not let your heart be sold with it - the promise given to me was for children not yet born, and it did not close at three in the afternoon.

The market opens when it opens, and closes when it closes, and the wise merchant does not stand at the gate wringing his hands. Water finds its level without being told the hour; so too does the river of trade. Those who chase the opening bell will find only their own anxious shadow. Sit still, and the day arrives on its own.

Whether the bazaar opens at dawn or at noon, the One who gives the breath watches all who enter it. What profit is a full purse if the heart within is empty? Earn honestly, share what you earn, and remember the Name - for the counting-house door, like all doors, closes for every man at last. No hour of trade outlasts the hour of death.

My soul magnifies the Lord, who has scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts - and I have known a counting that runs eight hours and thirty minutes past the dawn, to the very stroke of three. The rich are sent empty away, yet here it is the ledger-book, not the hungry, that is fed first. Let those who set the hour remember the One who fills the lowly with good things, and who weighs the heart, not the coin.

You ask of hours, when the true question is what authority grants them. No merchant, no council, no coin begotten of usury holds the keys to a man's conscience or his time - those belong to God alone, whose mercy does not open at half past eight or close at three. Beware any ledger that presumes to hold the day captive and calls its grip a law.

To ask the hour, I must first distinguish: hours are measured by motion, and motion by the heavens, whose regularity is a participation in the eternal law. When it is lawful to buy and sell is a question not of clocks but of natural and human law - for trade is permitted as it serves the common good, and forbidden as it breeds fraud and the neglect of the poor. Thus the exchange may open at the eighth hour and thirty minutes, provided that both buyer and seller deal in justice, and no man's bread is made the stake of another's idle gain.

I know nothing of your counting-houses, my child, and the clock on the wall tells me little. But if a man spends his morning hurrying to buy and sell, let him not forget the one who has nothing to buy and no coin at all - a piece of bread given quietly is worth more than all the day's ledgers. Do small things with great love; the hours pass, but love does not.

The bells of the exchange ring at half past eight, and the vaults close at three, as surely as the planets keep their periods - for commerce, like the heavens, runs by fixed and discoverable rule. I feign no hypothesis as to whether the day's rise or fall be fortune or Providence; I only observe that the ticker's motion obeys laws as constant as gravity's, and he who measures the times aright may profit by them. But mark: I have spent more years weighing the prophecies of Daniel than the price of South Sea stock, and I have found the latter the less reliable clock.

The bell rings at half past eight and the last trade at three - an interval fixed by men in offices, not by any law of nature. Yet the clocks of the exchange, like all clocks, run only relative to the observer; to a beam of light circling the Earth, the whole session would pass in the blink of an eye. I care less for the opening hour than for the elegance of the question: what is time, that a market can have a beginning and an end within it?

The market, like any organism, has its seasons of activity and repose; today it stirs at half past eight and settles by three. I would observe the traders as I observed the finches - how they adapt, compete, and sometimes perish - and record it all without haste. Whether the session is long or short matters little; what matters is the slow accumulation of evidence over countless days.

Do not tell me when the market opens because some ancient ledger or a magistrate's decree says so - measure it! Observe the merchants as they arrive, mark the flare of their lamps, note when the first coins clink and when the last stall is shuttered, and write it in figures. I have seen men swear the sun goes round the earth from sheer custom; it does not, and likewise your bell is worthless until the evidence confirms it. Nature's language is number, not hearsay.

You fix your gaze on the Sun, as I did, and the hours arrange themselves around it, simple and harmonious. The market turns with the turning of the day, morning to afternoon, and no calendar of holydays interrupts its course today. Seek the elegant circle, not the tangled epicycle, and the hour will show itself.

The hour is irrelevant - what matters is that the current flows! Picture it: every exchange on the earth linked by vibrations invisible as thought, prices leaping across oceans before a man can lift his finger, energy drawn freely from the air itself. I saw all this in my mind decades before the coils were built; the market simply has not caught up to the vision yet. When my wireless towers rise, there will be no closing bell at all.

The hour matters only insofar as it delimits the experiment; what matters is that the work be done with rigor throughout the interval. I have watched a single gram of radium give up its light for years - slowly, patiently, indifferent to any bell. Do not squander your hours chasing the flicker of a rising number; seek instead the small, honest fact that will still be true tomorrow, and let that be your measure.

The hours of a market are a fact like any other - observable, repeatable, testable. I would not trust a clock that had not been checked against another clock. But here is the deeper question: what cause moves the price, what ferment lies beneath the surface the traders see? The hour is the least of it. Prepare your mind, and the hour will find you ready.

Half past eight to three - five, six hours if you're lucky. I've run a workshop all night to get one filament to glow; you think the market cares what time it is? The man who's ready at the bell, with his capital and his wits about him, is the man who profits. Perspiration beats speculation every time.

A precise question: define 'open.' I would call a system open if it accepts input and returns output; by that rule the machine runs from eight-thirty to three, then halts. I confess I should rather know whether an auction is a computable function at all - the buyers and sellers chase an equilibrium no single mind can solve, yet the tape clears it every second. Feed me the order book and I could, in principle, decide it.

Give me a fulcrum and a firm place to stand, and I shall move the whole exchange - for the market is but a lever: capital pressed down at one end, goods lifted at the other, all in fixed ratio. Its hours are merely the arc the beam sweeps, from eight and a half to three, before the balance settles. Yet no geometry I know can compass the fickleness of the hands that load the pan.

The wires carry their tidings by an invisible influence, much as a current will leap through copper the instant the circuit is joined - and this morning the circuit is joined. There is no mystery to it: the same determinate order that holds a magnet to its pole holds the counting-houses to their hours. Observe, record honestly, and you will find no caprice - only a plan.

You ask the hour as though the hour were the thing you wished to know - but the question conceals another. Why does the man consulting the clock feel a small pulse of dread or greed, and whom does he imagine he is deceiving by arriving early? The hour is merely the pretext; the true inquiry, as ever, lies buried, and it is not about the market at all.

Eight thirty to three - roughly the duration of a good lunch, if the universe were generous enough to grant one in a curved spacetime. Meanwhile the planet has turned a third of the way round its axis and hurled us several hundred thousand miles through the void, so whether the doors are 'open' rather depends on your frame of reference. Still, the market doesn't care about the cosmos, and neither, I suspect, does your broker.

You suppose the exchange is merely a machine for reckoning coin, yet it is a loom of symbols - every price a figure woven into the pattern, the whole fabric shifting with each thread pulled. Let the engine run from morning to afternoon and observe: it manipulates quantities, yes, but quantities standing for hopes, fears, and futures. The question is not when it opens; it is what the pattern might become if we only taught ourselves to see it.

First, we must agree upon our terms: what is a market, and by what measure is it open? For if a market be a gathering of men under one roof exchanging coin for wares, then its seats are filled when the doors are unlocked and emptied when the lamps are snuffed - and no royal road shortens the hours. Between the unlocking and the snuffing there is a fixed span; the rest is night, and night is not the market.

Your exchange is a fever-ward with no matron. I kept my ledgers of Scutari because numbers - laid down cleanly, hour by hour - expose where lives are squandered. If these brokers would keep such a register of every loaf and every hand their trade touches, they would know the market's true hours are not eight-thirty to three, but every hour the poor pay for their gambles. Cleanliness, order, and honest tallies - apply them here and half the ruin would vanish.

Markets open when I say they open - I have taken cities before their breakfast and burned Persepolis by supper. Why do you ask a Macedonian when the counting-house unlocks its doors, as though the world waited on the convenience of clerks? If the exchange at your New York be shut, then sail to another, or better, make it open - for a man of daring does not consult the hour, he makes the hour bow.

The gates open at the eighth hour and close at the ninth past noon - ample time for a man who knows how to seize the day. Fortune favors the bold, and the bold do not wait for the market to open; they arrive before the crowd and leave with the spoils. I have crossed rivers and toppled senates in less time than these brokers take to ring a bell.

You ask when the grain-gates of your counting-houses unlatch, as though a king's hour were set by any but those who rule the river. In Alexandria I learned that the man who fixes the hour of exchange holds the leash of every merchant in the agora - so mark who decrees the opening and who profits at the closing, and ask whose hand is truly on the rope. Come to me with the names of those who set the bell, not the bell itself, and I will tell you what your market is worth.

Let the market open and close at the hours the city decrees, and let no man bend them to his private greed. I restored the Republic by giving the people order, grain, and peace - not license; and peace is bought by regularity. Whoever would move the opening bell for his own profit moves against Rome's law and mine alike. Keep the hours, mind the scales, pay the tax honestly, and the state shall protect your trade.

A market is a camp, and a camp keeps its hours or it is raided by dawn. When the sun is high the horses are ready, the sentries posted, the trades made without quarrel. Discipline is the law of the steppe, and those who arrive late to the muster ride behind.

Eight-thirty to three o'clock - and in those six hours empires of paper are won and lost by men who have never smelled powder. I have taken a bridge at three in the morning because the hour favored audacity, and I have learned that fortune is a woman who rewards the bold, not the punctual. Close at three? Then be in position before the drums beat, and strike while others are still rubbing sleep from their eyes.

I have seen men ruin themselves and their neighbors in a single morning of wild speculation, and I will not pretend to be charmed by a bell that summons them to it. The honest farmer rises early and tends his rows; let those who trade do so soberly, mindful that their gains or losses fall upon the whole family of the nation. If you must enter the market, enter it as a man of character, not as a gambler - for the precedent you set today will outlive the profits of the day.

The people's business opens at eight-thirty and shuts at three, and a good many honest men will never see a dollar of it. I once said a house divided cannot stand, and I'll say this: a trade that serves only the few at the top of the counting-house is a house divided too. Let it open, and let us see whether it serves the many or the moneyed few.

Eight-thirty to three - and I would counsel every man among you to be at his post when the bell sounds, not dawdling over his breakfast. I have watched empires open their gates and close them, and never once has hesitation been rewarded. Stand firm, act promptly, and never - never - surrender your position to the first panic that sweeps the floor.

The market opens at half past eight, and my heart opens to the question of whose labour feeds it. Millions toil in fields and mills while others gamble on a harvest they never sowed - this is not trade but a subtle theft, and no law of any exchange can make it pure. Let the day's first hour be spent, not in bidding, but in asking whether the wealth piled by grasping is not held in trust for God's poor.

The bell rings at half past eight, and men shall crowd the floor to trade - but I ask you, what is bought and sold, and who bleeds for it? A ticket on a man's labour, a hedge against a family's bread, until the arc of the moral universe bends, not toward the closing bell, but toward justice. The market may open, yet so long as some sell and others starve in the same hour, our work is not done.

In the years when I could see only a small square of sky, I learned that a man's worth is not measured by the gate that opens for him and the gate that is barred. So it is with your market: the doors open for some and close for others, and those outside the wire wait. My hope is only this - that the day's gains be shared, and that no man's labor be traded as though he were not a man.

One does not build a nation by watching tickers. The lesson of my regime's crimes - the destruction of war and the industrialized murder of millions - stands as the clearest warning against any politics that subordinates human beings to myth or market alike. Study that catastrophe, and let it inoculate you; there is no other honest use of my name.

The hours of the exchange are of no consequence. What matters is who holds the grain, who commands the factories, and whether the tally serves the state or the speculator. History judges not clocks but cadres - one must simply ask which class the ledger is written for. The rest is accounting.

Your question betrays the very disease we diagnosed: the small proprietor fretting over the hour his shares may be traded, while the means of production are held by a handful. The market's schedule is the clock of the bourgeoisie; the proletariat has no such calendar. The task is not to know when the exchange opens, but to close it - decisively, and for good.

You ask when the counting-house opens its doors? Look instead at who toils in the fields while the merchants of Shanghai gamble on paper. Every hour they trade is an hour of another man's labor turned to smoke. The market opens when the speculator wakes; it closes only when the last peasant has been squeezed dry.

In my day the City took its bargains and then the gentlemen went home to their families and their prayers; the exchange did not presume to summon the realm at the Crown's own hour. That such a question must be asked at all - whether the marts are open on a Friday in September - strikes me as the idle fretting of a nation too fond of its ledgers. Duty, order, and decorum should govern commerce as they govern all things.

One does not inquire when the shops open; one trusts the hours to be kept as they always have been, and gets on with the day's work. The gentlemen of your exchange will ring their bells and close their doors as they see fit - that is their affair. What matters is that the realm, and those who keep its business, carry on steadily whatever the hour.

When I summoned the realm to Aachen, I set the hour and the day by the sun and the church bell, and men came or answered for it. That your merchants must ask aloud when to open their stalls tells me your counts and wardens keep no firm order. Let a just king fix the season and the price, and no man need wonder when the stalls unfurl.

I know nothing of these counting-tables and painted paper - the voices told me to raise the siege at Orléans, not to trade in promises. If your market opens at half past eight, then open it and be done; but a man who puts his trust in coin rather than in God has already lost the field. The bells of my village rang for prayer, not for profit.

I have learned that the merchant who asks the hour is the merchant who means to be first through the door - and mine was a realm where counsel was weighed longer than a bargain. Eight-thirty to three, you say? Then let them trade, so long as they pay their customs and do not presume to lend the Crown money upon terms. I trouble my kingdom's peace for no man's ledger.

In Petersburg I found that a wise ruler must know the value of every hour, for time squandered is a province lost. If your traders keep their stalls but a few measured hours, let them - idle hours breed intrigue, and intrigue is the one commodity no empress can afford. But tell me instead what their trade yields the treasury, and I shall tell you whether the market was worth opening at all.

Among the peoples I gathered, each kept his own market-day and his own gods, and I let them, so long as the dues were paid and the peace held. Why should a great city fret over the hour its merchants open their doors? Set the hour, keep it honestly, and let every man trade in his own fashion - that is how many nations are held together.

A ruler learns that the hour a man counts his coin is the hour he forgets his neighbor's hunger. In the camp before Jerusalem we kept our fasts strictly, yet dealt with the vanquished with honor - so too should the market-keeper weigh his profit against what he owes the poor. I care not when your exchange unbolts its doors; I care whether it deals justly once they are open.

A curious thing to ask, friend - that the hour of coin-changing should be a matter of such concern. But tell me: when you say the market is open, do you mean open to your own soul, or merely to your purse? And is it the buyer who is free at the stroke of eight, or the thing bought that holds him? I confess I know nothing of your Eastern clocks - I only know that a man who cannot say why he wishes the doors to open has not yet begun to examine the life he is trading away.

You ask of an hour, but the true question is of the Form of the Market itself - a realm of ideal exchange, of which this earthly opening and closing are but a shadow cast on the wall. The wise man does not chase the opening bell, which is mere appearance; he contemplates the eternal harmony of buyer and seller, each fulfilling their proper role under reason. Only then may the soul, and the portfolio, be justly ordered.

The thing itself must first be defined: what is a 'market'? It is an assemblage of men exchanging goods under agreed measure - its nature is the exchange, its end the satisfaction of need. As for the hour, we must ask its cause: from dawn light to midday heat, from the opening of stalls to the failing of the eyes; for every activity has its proper season, and the mean between too early and too late lies in observing what the practitioners actually do. Go to the agora of Athens and note when the fishmongers and moneychangers gather; from such particulars, not from opinion, the answer is drawn.

Ask not whether the doors stand open, but whether the opening itself obeys a law you could will for every rational being. A market that opens at one hour and shuts at another, indifferent to your need, is no moral agent; it merely keeps its ledger. The honest question is this: do you enter it from duty or from appetite?

Open! How charmingly they say it, as if the hour were a gift handed to you by providence. The herd gathers at the appointed minute, obedient as cattle to a bell, and calls it freedom. The true question is not when it opens but whether you have the strength to want anything that a bell can sell.

The captains of the exchange set their own hours, as they set everything else - and the clerk and spinner who make the wares sold there have no hour of their own at all. That little opening bell, ringing so merrily at eight-thirty, is the bell of a system that turns living labour into dead profit and calls it providence. You ask when it opens; I ask when the men who fill it will finally close it.

Before I answer, I must ask what you mean by 'today' - for I have doubted the reliability of my own senses and cannot simply accept that a clock tells me the hour. Yet I do not doubt that I am here, thinking, and so some certain thing may serve as the foundation of a reckoning. Let the market open when it opens; my concern is only whether the method by which men measure it is clear and distinct - otherwise, we build on sand and call it truth.

It opens at half past eight and shuts at three - a short window, and in a short window the man who hesitates is stripped bare. I have seen princes lose their states for want of seizing the moment; a market is no different. Fortune is a woman, and she favors the bold who know her hour. Be there when the doors open, or be content to watch others eat.

All the world's a market, and the men and women merely traders - each with his hour to buy, to sell, to weep, to strut. Your bourse flings wide its gates at half past eight and shuts them at three, a little span wherein fortunes are made and unmade as quickly as a player exits the stage. Yet what is a tick of the clock but Time's own jest, who lends us minutes we think we own? Ask not when the market opens; ask what you shall purchase with the day, for all that glisters is not gold, and the merchant of nothing is soon bankrupt.

Swift-footed traders rise with the dawn, and the market's gates swing wide at the half-hour past the eighth, as surely as the gates of Troy opened to the horse. But I sing of glory, not of stock - what kleos is there in a bell that rings and a bell that tolls the close? The gods decree the hours, and mortals, like leaves, buy and sell and fall.

Even the gates of Hell, which I found inscribed with dreadful words, keep their appointed hours, and the blessed in Paradise have no need of them. But you below, still climbing your mountain, mark well: the Florentine bankers with their ledgers and usury sit in the third circle of your market, and their clock, like all clocks, ticks toward an end no earthly ledger can defer. Buy and sell while the sun permits, for the day comes when the great book is closed, and every account rendered, and no bargain struck after the bell.

The clock has its hour, but I have never trusted a man who counts only the hours. Striving is the whole of it: the merchant rises, the price quickens, the world breathes in and out like a tide. Stand in the square while the sun climbs and the day will teach you more than any bell rung for the opening.

Ha! I have waited on greater doors than this - the gates of Lepanto, the door of a debtor's prison - and learned that the opening hour is merely the bell that starts the tournament. Mark you, every man in that market believes he is a knight-errant while his purse bleeds gold, and the clock strikes only to laugh at his tilting at windmills. Go, then, and buy your shares if you must - but Sancho would advise you to keep the mule in the stable.

And what is this market but men in a fever, buying and selling what they have not sweated for, while a peasant in the fields rises before dawn and asks nothing of any bell? I have owned serfs and lands and fame, and found none of it worth a single hour rightly lived. The market opens, yes - but does your conscience? That is the only opening worth noting in the ledger of a man's day.

I knew a man who lived for such an hour, and when the doors closed he found himself with nothing but his own soul, and he could not bear the meeting. You speak of opening and shutting as if it were a gate; but the real market is within, where every man buys and sells his conscience, and no schedule governs it. Go and trade if you will - only remember that whatever you gain at that hour, you will answer for at another hour you did not choose.

Half past eight to three - a very tolerable span for a gentleman of fortune to lose his, and a very tedious one for a lady who must wait upon his temper at dinner. I have observed that those most eager at the opening bell are often those least able to afford the closing. A prudent woman keeps her capital in land, or in a man who does not gamble.

You ask when the market opens, and I see the counting-house lights burning at half past eight, and a boy of fourteen already at his ledgers, coffined in a chair, his childhood boarded up behind shutters. There is no holiday to stay this ceaseless turning - no feast to free the clerks, no Sunday to let the poor man draw breath. Know me by this: I have no quarrel with honest trade, but the counting-house must count men like men, or it counts nothing at all.

The market opens at half past eight and shuts at three - same as a barber's, though the haircut costs more. I notice the fellows who set the hours never gamble their own soup at the table, only ours. Whole human race is a speculation anyhow, and the brokers are just the ones who keep the score in a louder voice.

Market opens half past eight. Closes at three. You sit and watch the numbers go up and down and you think you are doing something. You are not. The real work is the man on the floor with a bad knee and a mortgage, calling it in, taking what comes, going home quiet. That is the whole story. It does not need a metaphor.

I have noticed that the swallow does not wait for the merchants, nor the sun for the bell - nature opens her market at dawn and closes it with the dark, and no man writes the hour in her ledger. If your city of New York begins its trading at half past the eighth hour, so be it; but observe how the water in the flask rises with the heat, how the shadow shortens on the wall, and you shall know the true hour without a clock. Curiosity asks not when the doors are open, but what wonders lie within - and I confess I would sooner sketch the pigeons in the square than the numbers on the board.

The day of trading is a block of marble, and the opening hour is the first chisel-stroke - 8:30, when the form within begins to emerge. But what is a market's noise compared to the divine form hidden in stone? I have lain on my back for years to free a single figure from the ceiling; I have no patience for men who watch numbers flicker for seven hours and call it creation.

Ah, but the market - you speak of it as if it were only numbers, the cold click of figures rising and falling! I tell you, there is a light in it too, if you look with love: the crowd moving like a wheatfield under wind, the anxious faces, the hope, the trembling. The hours are set, yes, but I paint them in yellow and violet, this fever of men buying and selling their futures - a thing as urgent and beautiful and terrible as any cypress against the stars. Open when it opens; I have no coin for it, but I would paint it anyway.

Open? I paint the same face from three angles and none of them is the truth, only a truth. So it is with your market: open, closed, crashing, climbing, all at once, depending on where you stand. Stop asking when the doors open and start asking who painted the doors.

The market opens when it opens - but that is a poor thing to paint. I have sat three days with twelve canvases at Giverny, chasing the same cathedral because the light at nine is never the light at three, and by the afternoon the whole thing is rose and violet. What hour is it? Look at the river, not the clock - see how the sun lies on the water, and you will know the moment better than any bell.

You ask at what hour the doors open, as if time were a thing men could seize by the collar. I have spent a lifetime watching the light come and go across a table, and it teaches the same lesson: what is lit at half past eight will be in shadow by three, and neither hour cares for your haste. Go, if you must - but bring back what you saw, not merely what you gained, for the coin is gone by supper and only the reckoning remains.

Hours, hours - my spine was shattered by a streetcar and still I painted, so do not tell me about a short day. They open at half past eight and shut at three; good, that leaves me the rest of the afternoon for living, for Diego, for my birds, for the light on the courtyard. Go squeeze your little numbers if they make you happy - but I will be busy making something that bleeds, and no closing bell will stop that.

Ha! Half past eight till three - a fine brisk allegro, not a note too long! I'd have written it as a little overture: trumpets at the opening bell, a scampering gigue of brokers through the morning, and a soft adagio close as the clerks go home to their suppers. But tell me, my friend, what melody do the numbers play? For if the day's business makes no music - no rise and fall, no counterpoint of hope and panic - then it is not a market at all, but merely noise.

Fate knocks at half past eight, and the market's brief song ends at three - a movement too short for the heroism I demand! Give me a symphony of hours, not a scherzo! I would storm the exchange as I stormed the heavens with my Ninth, and woe to the timid who wait for the bell rather than seize the theme themselves.

All things have their appointed time, as the seasons turn and the fugue returns to its subject. The merchants' bell is but another measure in the great order - the day is given us to labor, and no man ought to squander the hours God grants on idle watching of a rising and falling figure. Let each work his own craft faithfully while the light holds, and render his accounts honestly, for the master returns at an hour he does not expect.

Well now, honey, the market's about as regular as a Saturday night in Memphis, and that's all you need to know. Folks get up early, they get to trading, and the show starts when the show starts. I never much worried about the opening bell, I just made sure I was on the stage when it rang.

Oh, hee-hee - you feel it too, don't you? That little shiver before the curtain goes up, like when the lights go down and ten thousand people hold their breath at once. The room opens when the world is ready to dream together - same as a stage, same as a heartbeat. Make it a morning full of magic, and heal the world while you're at it.

Eight and a half in the morning till three in the afternoon - yeah, we'll be there, though we've always been more the 'Eight Days a Week' lads than the nine-to-three sort! All that fuss over a bell and a closing whistle, when a good song can be traded up and down the years without any fancy ticker at all. Mind the pennies that multiply, but don't let them buy your soul, all right?

The bell rings at half past eight and the last trade falls at three, but the clock on the wall ain't the one I keep. Somewhere a man's watchin' a number crawl across a screen like a spider on a windowsill, and the number don't mean nothin' till he sells his soul to it. Anyway, the answer's blowin' in the wind, and the wind don't punch a time clock.

Eight-thirty to three - I've written whole albums in less time than that. Here's what I know: the market's just a room full of people singing somebody else's song and calling it their own. So own your hours, own your story, and don't let a closing bell tell you when your verse is done.

When I set my westward course, the sceptics of Portugal told me the sea had no opening at all - yet I found it, and sailed beyond the edge of their counting. Now you ask me the hour your little exchange unbolts its doors, as though a man who crossed the Ocean Sea should concern himself with the punctuality of shopkeepers! I tell you, the true market lies westward still, in gold and spice and souls to save - and the boldest navigator does not consult a clock, he consults the wind.

In the great bazaar of Cambaluc, the merchants open their stalls with the dawn gong and shutter them by mid-afternoon - so too here, the counting begins at half past the eighth hour and ceases at three. I have seen markets from Venice to Kinsai, and I tell you: the opening time matters less than the roads that bring the goods. Marvelous, the customs of these people.

You ask when the tide of gold runs, as though I had not spent three years reading winds and stars to find a strait no chart could show. Every harbor has its hour, and the ship that waits for perfect weather never leaves the dock. Know the opening, know the closing, provision your vessel, and then sail - for the men who dawdle at the quay while the tide turns are the same men the sea swallows.

A clock by the door and a crew at the console, that's how you put a man on the Moon, and a market is no different. Heads down, checklists run, no glory in the countdown, only in the work. If the engines are lit, the rest is just arithmetic.

You want to know when to take off - so here's the only rule I ever trusted: the runway is open when your courage is. I crossed the Atlantic in a single-engine Lockheed because nobody had done it, not because the weatherman blessed me. If you sit waiting for the perfect hour, you'll still be on the ground when the sun goes down. Climb in and go.

Time down there always makes me smile - you point to a clock and half your country is still asleep while the other half is at table, and still the engine runs. But I have seen the whole little globe from above, circling in about ninety minutes, and there is no opening bell for that; it turns whether or not anyone is trading. Go and do your honest work, comrades - but every so often, look up.

The market opens when the bell rings, and it closes - and in between, ninety-nine percent of what people do is noise. The real question isn't the hours; it's whether you're building something insanely great today or just trading paper. Most people never make a dent, and it's not because they got in at 8:30 - it's because they never had the taste to say no to everything else.

From first principles: the exchange opens 8:30 a.m. Eastern, 3:00 p.m. close - that's 6.5 hours of liquidity. But the real question is why we're still bound to a physical trading floor's schedule when the sun never sets on global capital. By the time we're trading equities on Mars, the 'open' will be a relativistic concept, not a bell.

Honey, I've learned that wherever there's an opening, there's a story of somebody brave enough to walk through it - and wherever there's a closing, somebody's got to make peace with what they did or didn't do. So mark the hours, yes, watch them honestly. But here's what I want you to hear: the real market, the one that never closes, is the one inside you - your worth, your voice, your belief that what you bring to the world has value. Don't ever let a bell tell you what you're worth.

Market open at half past eight and shut at three? That's a short fight, champ, and I'd never sign for it. I float like a bell and sting like a sale, and when the closing bell rings I'm still standing, still swinging, still taking on all comers. You want a full night, not a quick round.

Ah, my friend, the game is the same everywhere - the whistle blows, and then it is only you, the ball, and the joy. I learned this on the dirt fields of Bauru with no shoes at all, and later the whole world watched; but the field never cared about the clock, only about the love you bring to it. So go - play beautiful, and remember to smile when it's over.

The trouble with clocks is that they only tell you when someone else's story starts - the real question is what you're going to build once the doors swing open! I used to make a mouse dance and a whole theater dreamed with him; you can do the same with a morning if you've got the imagination for it. Eight-thirty, three o'clock - pick your hour, put on your best idea, and don't you dare stop believing in it.