The New York Stock Exchange’s famously hectic trading floor was dead quiet this morning as it opened for the first time in its history without traders.
The exchange decided to move all-electronic trading late last week despite NYSE President Stacey Cunningham’s best efforts to keep it open with strict safety precautions in place. Those measures included daily deep-cleans and temperature checks for traders at the door.
“The fact that we have people applying human judgment to trading helps dampen volatility, and we're in an exceptionally volatile period of time,” Cunningham told Cheddar last week.
While the broader impact on markets will take time to determine, in the short-term the move has sparked fear in some brokers about the future of traders, who have already seen their roles shrink over the years as electronic and algorithmic trading have grown.
In terms of day-to-day operations, the situation puts limits on the kinds of trading that can take place while brokers do their work from home.
“There’s only a certain amount of clients that we can trade for off the floor, and there’s a good portion of our clients that we are only allowed to trade for when we’re on the floor,” Jonathan Corpina, a trader for Meridian Equity Partners, told Cheddar.
The firm’s broker-to-broker business, for instance, is essentially shut down until it can return to the floor.
The coronavirus has further complicated the shut down because remote trading sites in Connecticut and New Jersey are also closed, as a widespread quarantine takes hold across the region.
“We have a business continuity plan that’s in place, and we do run satellite offices on a day-in and day-out basis, but not having access to those offices made us change our plans completely over the last week,” Corpina said.
Meridian Equity Partners spent the weekend prepping brokers to work remotely, making sure phones and other technology needs were up to the task.
“So far today everything has been working as planned,” he said.
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A Michigan judge is putting sponges in the hands of shoplifters and ordering them to wash cars in a Walmart parking lot when spring weather arrives. Genesee County Judge Jeffrey Clothier hopes the unusual form of community service discourages people from stealing from Walmart. The judge also wants to reward shoppers with free car washes. Clothier says he began ordering “Walmart wash” sentences this week for shoplifting at the store in Grand Blanc Township. He believes 75 to 100 people eventually will be ordered to wash cars this spring. Clothier says he will be washing cars alongside them when the time comes.
The State Department had been in talks with Elon Musk’s Tesla company to buy armored electric vehicles, but the plans have been put on hold by the Trump administration after reports emerged about a potential $400 million purchase. A State Department spokesperson said the electric car company owned by Musk was the only one that expressed interest back in May 2024. The deal with Tesla was only in its planning phases but it was forecast to be the largest contract of the year. It shows how some of his wealth has come and was still expected to come from taxpayers.
At 100 years old, the Goodyear Blimp is an ageless star in the sky. The 246-foot-long airship will be in the background of the Daytona 500 — flying roughly 1,500 feet above Daytona International Speedway, actually — to celebrate its greatest anniversary tour. Even though remote camera technologies are improving regularly and changing the landscape of aerial footage, the blimp continues to carve out a niche. At Daytona, with the usual 40-car field racing around a 2½-mile superspeedway, views from the blimp aptly provide the scope of the event.
You'll just have to wait for interest rates (and prices) to go down. Plus, this deal's a steel, the big carmaker wedding is off, and bribery is back, baby!
