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Securities regulators of the Chinese mainland and Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR) recently announced in-principal approval to enhance the trading calendar of Stock Connect, which will increase the number of trading days.
It is estimated that the current number of untradeable days is expected to fall by about half, the Xinhua News Agency reported.
The China Securities Regulatory Commission (CSRC) and Securities and Futures Commission of Hong Kong (SFC) have approved for changes to the trading calendar, the CSRC said in a statement on Friday, according to which the enhancement push has officially kicked off.
With the deepening development of the connectivity mechanism between the mainland and Hong Kong, investors from both sides are increasingly demanding an optimization of the trading calendar to add more trading days to Stock Connect, said regulators.
Because different public holidays are observed in the mainland and HKSAR, investors currently cannot trade through Stock Connect on certain days.
The proposed changes "enable Stock Connect trading on any day when both the mainland and Hong Kong markets are open, even when the corresponding settlement day falls on a public holiday," according to an announcement by the SFC on Friday.
About five trading days will be added to Stock Connect northbound trading on an average annual basis after the calendar improvement, while nine days will be added to Stock Connect southbound trading, Xinhua reported, citing an official of the CSRC.
The working principles of the Shanghai-Hong Kong Stock Connect and Shenzhen-Hong Kong Stock Connect mechanism will be basically unchanged, the CSRC said in the Friday statement. 
The implementation of the enhancements to the trading calendar will take six months to prepare and will be subject to regulatory approvals and market readiness. The launch date will be announced in due course, according to Xinhua.
"Stock Connect provides a unique opportunity for mainland and Hong Kong investors to participate in each other's market," read the SFC announcement, citing SFC CEO Ashley Alder. "The enhancements will allow investors to better manage their portfolios through Stock Connect and support the further expansion of the program."
By the end of June, the northbound leg of the stock connect linkups between the mainland and Hong Kong bourses held 2.55 trillion yuan ($378 billion) of stocks on the A-share market, while the southbound leg held 1.91 trillion yuan of shares on the Hong Kong bourse, according to the CSRC statement.