Take A Seat (and Four Screens): Broker Booths Disappearing From NYSE Trading Floor
October 5, 2009
Pull up a seat, floor traders at the New York Stock Exchange.
Starting early next year, NYSE traders will no longer have to stand at their stations all day without a place to rest their feet. That will be one of the many changes brought about by extensive renovations to the trading floor in the stock exchange's 106-year-old Main Room.
Broker booths will be replaced with modern trading desks. Each trader will face four screens, instead of one. And a new, more powerful network, better capable of supporting all of a firm's trading applications, according to the NYSE, will create what the exchange calls a "unified trading environment." This will allow both traders on the floor and "upstairs" at off-exchange desks to operate together with both system applications accessible from the NYSE floor.
The refurbishment will take place through spring 2011, about 18 months. The overhaul--drawn up by New York-based design and architecture firm Perkins Eastman--begins this month with the demolition of traders' booths beneath the Main Room's west balcony. Those will be replaced with large open trading areas that will be able to accommodate as many as 40 traders each, each watching market data on four flat screens. In total, about 250 new trading positions underneath the east and west balconies will be created.
With the renovation, the NYSE hopes to bring under its roof more of the "upstairs," off-exchange trading desks.
Upstairs traders are "used to not standing, they're used to not having one screen in front of them but four. They're used to having a network that allows them to go anywhere they want to," said Lou Pastina, NYSE Euronext's executive vice president in charge of NYSE operations.
Part of the value proposition of the next-generation NYSE floor is that it will be much easier to access multiple other markets from the NYSE, while still being able to walk out to an NYSE trading post, where a trader can talk directly to a designated market maker or other brokers, the company said.
"In an effort to entice firms from upstairs who are paying rent in midtown or downtown that is a lot more expensive than this space here which we fully own, [we're giving] them an option to not only do the business they would do upstairs at a trading desk but be able to walk out into a trading crowd and be right at the point of sale and participate. That's an option you wouldn't have if you were upstairs."
The switch, Pastina believes, will give such traders the efficiency and the comfort they're used to, at their off-exchange desks.
"If you throw all of that together, here is a unique opportunity to bring in new entrants into this marketplace and to do it in a way that's pretty innovative," Pastina said.
The exchange's last major renovation was completed in the mid-90s when member firms were permitted to use their own designs and money to build out their own booths, he said.
Pastina declined to name a specific dollar figure but said the renovation will cost "big bucks."
Carl Ordemann, a principal at Perkins Eastman, who has been working with the NYSE on various projects for 25 years, called the redesign "a whole different way of looking at a trading desk."
