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New York Stock Exchange (NYSE)

The New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) is a stock exchange based in New York City, New York. It is the largest stock exchange in the world by dollar volume and has over 2,764 listed securities. It ranks fourth in the world in terms of company listings with 3,200 companies, behind the Bombay Stock Exchange, London Stock Exchange, and NASDAQ. As of December 31, 2006, the combined capitalization of all New York Stock Exchange listed companies was $25 trillion.

The NYSE is operated by NYSE Euronext, which was formed by the NYSE's merger with the fully electronic stock exchange Euronext. Its trading floor is located at 11 Wall Street and is composed of four rooms used for the facilitation of trading. A fifth trading room, located at 30 Broad Street, was closed in February 2007. The main building, located at 18 Broad Street between the corners of Wall Street and Exchange Place, was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1978.

History

The origin of the NYSE can be traced to May 17, 1792, when the Buttonwood Agreement was signed by 24 stock brokers outside of 68 Wall Street in New York under a buttonwood tree on Wall Street which earlier was the site of a stockade fence. On March 8, 1817, the organization drafted a constitution and renamed itself the "New York Stock & Exchange Board". (This name was shortened to its current form in 1863.) Anthony Stockholm was elected the Exchange's first president. (For other presidents, see List of presidents of the New York Stock Exchange.)

The floor of the New York Stock Exchange in 1908

The first central location of the NYSE was a room rented for $200 a month in 1817 located at 40 Wall Street. The NYSE was destroyed in the Great Fire of New York (1835). It moved to a temporary headquarters. In 1863 it changed its name to the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE). In 1865 it moved to 10-12 Broad Street. The Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) was created by Dow Jones & Company, a financial news publisher, in 1896.

The volume of stocks traded increased sixfold in the years between 1896 and 1901 and a larger space was required to conduct business in the expanding marketplace. Eight New York City architects were invited to participate in a design competition for a new building and the Exchange selected the neoclassic design from architect George B. Post. Demolition of the existing building at 10 Broad Street and the adjacent lots started on May 10, 1901.

The New York Stock Exchange building opened at 18 Broad Street on April 22, 1903 at a cost of $4 million. The trading floor was one of the largest volumes of space in the city at the time at 109 x 140 feet (33 x 42.5 m) with a skylight set into a 72-foot (22 m) high ceiling. The main facade of the building features marble sculpture by John Quincy Adams Ward in the pediment, above six tall Corinthian capitals, called “Integrity Protecting the Works of Man”. The building was listed as a National Historic Landmark and added to the National Register of Historic Places on June 2, 1978.

In 1922, a building designed by Trowbridge & Livingston was added at 11 Broad Street for offices, and a new trading floor called "the garage". Additional trading floor space was added in 1969 and 1988 (the "blue room") with the latest technology for information display and communication. Another trading floor was opened at 30 Broad Street in 2000. With the arrival of the Hybrid Market, a greater proportion of trading was executed electronically and the NYSE decided to close the 30 Broad Street trading room in early 2006. In late 2007 the exchange closed the rooms created by the 1969 and 1988 expansions due to the declining number of traders and employees on the floor, a result of increased electronic trading.

The 11 Wall Street building was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1978.

Events

The exchange was closed shortly after the beginning of World War I (July 31, 1914), but it partially re-opened on November 28 of that year in order to help the war effort by trading bonds, and completely reopened for stock trading in mid-December.

On September 16, 1920, a bomb exploded on Wall Street outside the NYSE building, killing 33 people and injuring more than 400. The perpetrators were never found. The NYSE building and some buildings nearby, such as the JP Morgan building, still have marks on their facades caused by the bombing.

The Black Thursday crash of the Exchange on October 24, 1929, and the sell-off panic which started on Black Tuesday, October 29, are often blamed for precipitating the Great Depression of 1929. In an effort to try to restore investor confidence, the Exchange unveiled a fifteen-point program aimed to upgrade protection for the investing public on October 31, 1938.

On October 1, 1934, the exchange was registered as a national securities exchange with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, with a president and a thirty-three member board. On February 18, 1971 the non-profit corporation was formed, and the number of board members was reduced to twenty-five.

One of Abbie Hoffman's well-known protests took place on August 24, 1967, when he led members of the Yippie movement to the gallery of the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE). The protesters threw fistfuls of dollars (most of the bills were fake) down to the traders below, some of whom booed, while others began to scramble frantically to grab the money as fast as they could. Hoffman claimed to be pointing out that, metaphorically, that's what NYSE traders "were already doing." "We didn't call the press," wrote Hoffman, "at that time we really had no notion of anything called a media event." The press was quick to respond and by evening the event was reported around the world. Since that incident, the stock exchange has spent $20,000 to enclose the gallery with bulletproof glass.

On October 19, 1987, the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) dropped 508 points, a 22.6% loss in a single day, the second-biggest one-day drop the exchange had experienced, prompting officials at the exchange to invoke for the first time the "circuit breaker" rule to halt all trading. This was a very controversial move and led to a quick change in the rule; trading now halts for an hour, two hours, or the rest of the day when the DJIA drops 10, 20, or 30 percent, respectively. In the afternoon, the 10% and 20% drops will halt trading for a shorter period of time, but a 30% drop will always close the exchange for the day. The rationale behind the trading halt was to give investors a chance to cool off and reevaluate their positions. Black Monday was followed by Terrible Tuesday, a day in which the Exchange's systems did not perform well and some people had difficulty completing their trades.

There was a panic similar to many with a fall of 7.2% in value (554.26 points) on October 27, 1997 prompted by falls in Asian markets, from which the NYSE recovered quickly.

On January 26, 2000, an altercation during filming of the music video for Sleep Now in the Fire, which was directed by Michael Moore, caused the doors of the exchange to be closed and the band, Rage Against the Machine, to be escorted from the site by security, after band members attempted to gain entry into the exchange. Trading on the exchange floor, however, continued uninterrupted.

Security after the September 11 attacks

The NYSE was closed from September 11 until September 17, 2001 as a result of the September 11 attacks.
On September 17, 2003, NYSE chairman and chief executive Richard Grasso stepped down as a result of controversy concerning the size of his deferred compensation package. He was replaced as CEO by John S. Reed, the former Chairman of Citigroup.

The NYSE announced its plans to acquire Archipelago on April 21, 2005, in a deal intended to reorganize the NYSE as a publicly traded company. NYSE's governing board voted to acquire rival Archipelago on December 6, 2005, and become a for-profit, public company. It began trading under the name NYSE Group on March 8, 2006. A little over one year later, on April 4, 2007, the NYSE Group completed its merger with Euronext, the European combined stock market, thus forming the NYSE Euronext, the first transatlantic stock exchange.

Presently, Marsh Carter is Chairman of the New York Stock Exchange, having succeeded John S. Reed and the CEO is Duncan Niederauer, having succeeded John Thain.

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