NEW YORK (AFX) - The New York Stock Exchange plans to shut down about 20 percent of its trading space over the next 18 months as more of its activities move to electronic exchanges.
The NYSE will be moving 34 firms from a 10,000-foot space in Lower Manhattan that the exchange has leased since November 2000 to its remaining 36,000-square-foot trading floor on Wall Street.
The move comes as stock trading becomes increasingly electronic, resulting in job cuts at traditional exchanges. While competing markets such as the Nasdaq are completely electronic, NYSE traders still work on the exchange's cavernous floor, where 'specialists' maintain a market for either a single stock, or multiple stocks, matching buyers and sellers.
The push is for those matches to be made more cheaply and quickly by computer. NYSE Group Inc., the NYSE's publicly traded operator, bought electronic exchange Archipelago earlier this year.
NYSE Group said last week that its third-quarter profits tripled on higher fees generated by listing companies and new products from its acquisition of Archipelago.
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© 2006 AFX News
