NEW YORK — The New York Stock Exchange is being sold to a little-known rival in Atlanta for about $8 billion, ending more than two centuries of independence for the iconic Big Board.
The buyer, IntercontinentalExchange, a 12-year-old exchange that deals in investing contracts known as futures, said Thursday that little would change for the trading floor in Manhattan’s financial district. The NYSE dates to 1792, when 24 brokers and merchants traded stocks under a buttonwood tree on Wall Street. But its importance today is mostly symbolic. Most trading is done on computers that match thousands of orders a second. “The cash equities business in America has effectively been obliterated,” said Thomas Caldwell, chairman of Caldwell Securities in Toronto and a shareholder in the New York exchange’s parent company, NYSE Euronext.
He said that the jewel of the deal is not the New York exchange but Liffe, a futures exchange founded in London. “The original New York Stock Exchange, it’s got a brand name, it’s got recognition, but as a business it’s a very small part of this thing,” Caldwell said.
Three decades ago, the floor of the New York exchange was full of bustling traders. Today, one of its largest booths belongs to the cable news channel CNBC, which broadcasts there for most of the business day.
NYSE Euronext has been looking for a deal. Last year, ICE and Nasdaq OMX Group Inc., which competes with the NYSE for stock listings, made an $11 billion bid to buy NYSE Euronext. But that deal fell apart after regulators raised antitrust concerns. Earlier this year, European regulators blocked Deutsche Boerse AG from buying NYSE Euronext.
ICE was established in May 2000. Its founding shareholders represented some of the world’s largest energy companies and financial institutions, according to the company’s most recent annual report.
ICE’s stated mission was to transform the energy futures market by providing more transparency.
The company has expanded through a series of acquisitions during the last decade and listed on the NYSE in an initial public offering in November 2005.
Peter Costa, President of Empire Executions Inc., a boutique trading firm on the floor of the NYSE, and a governor with the New York Stock Exchange, said that both companies knew the value of the NYSE brand and would try to preserve it. “The trading floor, while iconic, may seem to be an anachronism in this high-speed world of electronic this and electronic that, but it still survives because the customers that use the trading floor still see the added value of having some human intervention,” Costa said in an email.
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