Yesterday a customer contacted us asking if our financial markets data Add-in could calculate the number of trading days between two dates. Unfortunately we don’t have this functionality as implementing it is not as easy as you may think.
You need to take into account weekends, which for most financial markets are Saturday and Sunday. Exceptions to this include several markets in the Middle East such as Saudi Arabia where the working week is Sunday to Thursday and the “weekend” is Friday and Saturday.
You also need to account for market holidays which are usually, although not always, also national holidays.
Fortunately Excel provides the NETWORKDAYS function, which:
Returns the number of whole working days between start_date and end_date. Working days exclude weekends and any dates identified in holidays.
This function can be used, together with a holiday lookup, to provide the functionality we need.
In the example above we are using a holiday list lookup in column D together with the NETWORKDAYS function in cell B4 to compute the trading days between 21 July 2020 and 1 Dec 2020 for the US market.
The NETWORKDAYS function assumes that weekends are Saturday and Sunday. If you wish to specify a different weekend then you can use the NETWORKDAYS.INTL function.
The Excel Price Feed Blog 
A big thank you 2 years late
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Thanks for the Thank You, sorry we couldn’t have published it sooner!
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I meant my thank you was 2 years after you posted it…I just found it and used it today. Thanks again…
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