In the previous lesson you saw what an exchange is in general, how it brings buyers and sellers together, and why a working capital market needs one. Now we meet the specific exchange that will matter most to you as an Israeli investor: the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange, often shortened to TASE. The goal of this lesson is to introduce TASE from the outside, before later lessons take you into stocks, bonds, and funds.
Keep your expectations modest. By the end of this page, you should know roughly when TASE is open, what currency you trade in, who supervises it, where companies file their reports, and who actually participates in the market.
A Short History
TASE was officially founded in 1953. Before that, securities did change hands in pre-state Israel, but trading was informal and there was no single body responsible for rules, supervision, or settlement.
Since 1953 the exchange has changed quite a bit. It moved from a physical trading floor to a fully electronic platform. It expanded the range of products that trade on it. It went through several waves of regulatory reform. TASE itself demutualized in 2017 to 2018, becoming a for-profit company. In August 2019 it completed its IPO and listed its own shares on its own exchange, a major step that paved the way for governance reforms and the recent move to a Monday-Friday trading week. Until that restructuring it was owned by its members, mainly the banks and a few financial institutions. The same institution that hosts trading in other companies' shares is now itself a listed company with shareholders, quarterly reports, and a board.
You do not need to memorize any of this. Just hold on to the framing. TASE is a relatively young institution, it grew alongside the State of Israel, and it keeps evolving.
When TASE Is Open
TASE trades Monday through Friday. Saturday and Sunday are closed, and so are Israeli holidays. This is a meaningful change that took effect in January 2026: TASE moved away from its historical Sunday-through-Thursday week to align with global markets and improve access for foreign investors. If you grew up reading about Israeli markets, this is the most important update to absorb.
Most days follow the same rhythm: an opening auction, continuous trading through the day, and a closing auction at the end. Trading on Monday through Thursday runs roughly from 9:59 in the morning to 17:14 in the late afternoon. Friday is shortened, ending around 13:34 to allow for the start of the Sabbath. Exact times can shift slightly over time and can differ between security types, so for the precise current schedule check the TASE website rather than memorizing numbers.
So what is an "auction" inside a trading day? At those moments the exchange collects buy and sell orders, then sets a single price that lets the most trades clear at once. Between the two auctions, you have continuous trading, where each order is matched against whatever is available on the other side. We will look at order books up close in the lesson on reading quotes.
What You Trade, and in What Currency
The currency of TASE is the New Israeli Shekel, which most people simply call the shekel (NIS). Everything that trades on TASE is priced in shekels, and at the end of the day your gain or loss shows up in shekels.
There is one beginner gotcha you should hear right now: most stocks on TASE are not quoted in shekels. They are quoted in agorot. An agora is one one-hundredth of a shekel, like a cent to a dollar. So when you see a stock listed at "3,500," that usually does not mean 3,500 shekels per share. It means 3,500 agorot, which is 35 shekels. A factor-of-100 mistake is one of the most common new-investor errors when looking at an Israeli price screen for the first time. We will revisit this carefully in the lesson on reading quotes, but file it away now.
A note on identifiers. Every security on TASE has a numeric security ID. The company name is of course shown everywhere, but the formal identifier is a number. In practice, every trading platform shows you both, so this rarely gets in your way. Just do not be surprised when you see long strings of digits next to company names. That is the local convention.
What Actually Trades on TASE
TASE is the home market of the Israeli economy. When you scan the list of listed companies, you mostly see businesses that an Israeli investor encounters in everyday life. The banks where you keep your salary, the insurers that manage your pension, the real-estate companies developing new neighborhoods in high-demand areas, the supermarket chains where you do the weekend shopping, the energy companies that supply electricity and gas, local food producers, telecom operators, industrial firms, and manufacturers.
The practical effect is that when you read a report from a TASE-listed company, you usually already know what the company does, before you even open the file. You have seen its branches, used its service, maybe walked past land it is developing. That familiarity is not a substitute for analysis, but it is a comfortable place to start, especially once later lessons show you how to read filings.
TASE classifies companies by sector and builds reference indices that follow groups of companies. TA-35 is the index of the 35 largest companies. TA-90 is the index of the next 90 by size. There are also sub-indices by sector: real estate, banks, insurance, technology, and others. We will dedicate a separate lesson to indices.
Who Supervises the Market
Not anyone can run an exchange, and not any company can sell shares to the public without oversight. In Israel that oversight is provided by the Israel Securities Authority, often shortened to ISA. The ISA approves prospectuses, supervises ongoing reporting by listed companies, and reviews the conduct of investment firms.
For you as a private investor, this matters in two practical ways. First, when a company wants to raise money from the public, it has to publish a prospectus that follows clear rules. Second, the routine company reports you will read during the year are not voluntary marketing. Companies are obligated to publish them in defined formats. We will return to those reports in the lesson on reading filings.
The place where all those filings actually appear is called MAYA, the official electronic disclosure system, at maya.tase.co.il. Quarterly reports, immediate disclosures of material events, prospectuses, board decisions that have to be made public, all of them flow through MAYA. It is the official source of record. At some point in your life as an Israeli investor, you will go there directly to read a filing in raw form, without a news site standing between you and the document.
Who Actually Operates Inside the Market
Beyond the exchange itself and the regulator, a few types of participants are worth knowing.
Retail investors are private individuals trading through a broker or a bank. You are likely one, or about to become one.
Institutional investors are the pension funds, provident funds, insurance companies, and mutual funds. They manage the public's money in volumes far larger than any single retail investor, and they are the dominant players in daily trading volume.
Market makers are firms that commit to continuously post buy and sell quotes for specific securities, in order to keep them liquid. Without them, smaller stocks could end up with no available counterparty when you want to trade.
Members of the exchange are the entities through which trades actually flow. These are mainly the banks and authorized broker-dealers. You do not trade directly with the exchange. You trade through one of these members.
Now that you know which exchange you are looking at, when it is open, what currency it uses, where its filings appear, and who is moving inside it, the next lesson moves on to the building blocks themselves: a stock, a bond, and a fund.