My friend Bart Ward is the CEO of an investment-management firm in Anoka, Minn. and also the biggest financial-market-history buff I know, as evidenced by his many comments on this blog, and his own column on his firm's Web site.
So in response to my post The Remake of the NYSE Trading Floor: Who's Responsible and What It Means, Bart wrote:
Ray,
I bet you folks have found some pretty neat things under all that wall covering. I have seen the floor transformed quite a few times since the early 1980s, but this one will be more than just an update or an add to technology. Are you guys taking any tips from your colleagues at Euronext Amsterdam? While I realize they have a much different operation, as you know they did quite a transformation to their floor back a few years ago.
I can't tell you how many NYSE floor eulogies I have read over the years, starting with Chris Welles book, "The Last Days of the Club," which by the way was written in the mid '70s.
Keep up the good work Ray!
Regards,
Bart Ward
by Bart Ward on March 10, 2010 3:40 PM
And I responded:
Bart -- Thanks for the good note. I think the stuff they dug up in the construction was more along the lines of the detritus that builds up in your desk drawer over time, not stuff of archival value. But I'll ask and let you know.
You hit the nail on the head about Amsterdam -- our good colleagues work in re-opening their floor to traders gave us the inspiration to re-imagine our floor.
I too have read many premature obits for the NYSE and the floor over the years. I hope to make it to retirement age here, and maybe I'll throw myself a party and read a bunch of those obits aloud for a toast. Long may the floor run.
by Ray Pellecchia on March 10, 2010 7:43 PM
Bart's comment about finding neat stuff during the construction stayed with me, and I asked around. In comes this e-mail from my colleague Harry Weber, one of the heads of the NYSE next-generation trading floor project:
The question you asked which came from the comment posted on your blog -- I thought about this a bit. We did uncover something I thought was fascinating. It wasn't in the new booth area, but under [specialist] Post 1, when we were gutting it, stripping the floors and creating swing space [for the floor brokers displaced by the new construction].
I couldn't figure out what it was at first, and then learned it was the base of the original trading posts that you see in some of the vintage photos. It is hard to tell from the attached photos, but the circular cutout is slightly larger than a manhole cover.
Some may not appreciate this, but like you, I stared at this circular cutout on the floor and imagined this place a hundred years ago!!
Thanks for that, Harry, and for including the photos you had the presence of mind to take before the contractors swept that history away:
How cool is that? Kind of a ghostly image, almost like the outline of the old trading post was etched into history as it was carved into the old wood floor, to be uncovered and reflected on decades later like a time capsule. A reminder of how the marketplace has remade itself time and again throughout its history and is doing so again today.
Harry also included -- courtesy of our AMCs (archive-maintaining colleagues) -- a photo of what the smaller trading posts looked like back in that day:
I'm reminded of a saying I've heard here:
The tape keeps moving, right to left.
Or as Ferris Buehller famously put it:
Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.
I've also heard of another artifact being uncovered, and I'm going to check that out and will report back another time. Have a great weekend, my friends.
