Another brokerage goes electronic at the NYSE
By Edgar Ortega and Deborah Kostroun Bloomberg NewsPublished: May 14, 2007
NEW YORK: Sanford C. Bernstein, the brokerage owned by the money manager AllianceBernstein Holding, has eliminated its trading staff on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. All its trading is now done electronically.
With the move, the brokerage joins a growing list of firms that rely increasingly on computers for trading.
"We've moved so much of our trading to an electronic mode, and will likely continue that trend, that we decided we no longer needed a presence on the floor," John Meyers, a spokesman for AllianceBernstein, said Friday.
Before the change, the brokerage employed at least eight traders, who handled about 10 million shares a day, according to NYSE data.
JPMorgan Chase, the U.S. bank, cut six of 14 jobs at the Big Board earlier this week. With the introduction of a new electronic trading system at the NYSE this year, floor traders handle about 18 percent of the 1.6 billion shares traded daily, down from 86 percent at the start of 2006, according to the exchange's Web site.
Specialist firms responsible for matching buyers and sellers on the floor of the NYSE have made the largest staff cuts. LaBranche, Van der Moolen and Bank of America have fired a total of about 200 employees in the past year. Brokerages including Lehman Brothers, Credit Suisse and UBS have also eliminated jobs.
NYSE Euronext, owner of the Big Board along with five other stock exchanges in Europe and the United States, introduced the so-called Hybrid Market to meet investor demand for faster anonymous trading and to fend off competition from the automated Nasdaq Stock Market. This year the NYSE shuttered one of five trading rooms, shrinking space for the first time in more than a century.
John Thain, the chief executive of NYSE Euronext, said earlier this month that traders at the NYSE handled enough shares to merit the floor's current size, even as investors increasingly rely on automated markets.
"The exchange already is almost all electronic, but a lot of the electronic trading is the specialists and the brokers on the floor," Thain said at a conference at Baruch College in New York. "They will continue to add value, which means there will continue to be a floor." |
