Well, thanks for the replies, everyone. I still don't get it. (I'm talking about the delay on normal trading such as through Etrade, BTW - not anything to do with cash I don't have.)
And I'm not whinging - just asking. Seems to me someone is using the funds in the interim and I cannot use the funds for anything else - either when buying or selling. So that's six days altogether on the buy and sell side when I don't have the use of the funds. I don't care on the buy side, obviously, because I got the shares at the price I paid on the day. But on the sell side I cannot use the money for another three days. Money could be used to earn quite a bit in those three days.
The banking industry has pretty well cleaned up its act with electronic transfers etc, and no longer imposing lengthy delays in deposits and withdrawals, which used to take forever. The share market might think about looking at this also.
It's good that it was reduced from 5 to 3 days. Now if they can change it to one day, that would be better.
