Thursday, November 1, 2012

How Wall Street went to work with the lights out




Fortune reports that Wall Street isn't going to let some pesky tropical storm get the best of it. After two days of closure, the markets reopened on Wednesday to solid, albeit, light, trading, with only a few technical glitches. Large equity orders that had stuffed up the pipes ran through the system relatively well considering the four-day-long break in trading. Treasuries and other fixed income products also made it through the gates relatively unscathed....

There was concern about Wall Street's ability to rise to the occasion yesterday -- not because of flooded servers (The NYSE has its computerized data hub some 30 miles to the west of the exchange floor); rather, it was out of concern that the traders, bankers, lawyers and analysts that run the machines simply wouldn't show up for work. While the vast majority of trades conducted on Wall Street are done by computers, humans are still needed to make the investment decisions that make the machines trade. At the same time, there are also a lot of trades conducted in the so-called "over-the-counter" market – like physical commodity trades or credit default swaps, that depend on bids and offers from real people…..

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