Just last month, I stood on Broad Street and looked up at the main building of the New York Stock Exchange in lower Manhattan. It's the symbolic home of American capitalism, the "Big Board," the place where shares of America's blue-chip companies are bought and sold.
When news first broke Wednesday morning that the New York Stock Exchange had an unspecified technical issue and trading was shut down, a little fear was understandable. It was the same day that a major airline had been grounded by a computer glitch and there was certainly a chance this was some sort of cyber-attack on a major American institution.
It already hadn't been a great week in the equities markets, with concerns over Greek debt and the swooning China stock market among other things making headlines. Taking the NYSE offline certainly wouldn't help.
And then… Not much happened.
The NASDAQ sent a notice that it was up and running and that it would still be trading all the stocks of the NYSE. It would be business as usual.
In fact there are really about a dozen "exchanges" that can handle the stock trading volume, but don't think of these as exchanges with traders in their coats and ID badges handling the business face-to-face on some sort of trading floor. It's all done through computers. Even an electronic market called NYSE Arca continued to be up and running. The NYSE, it turns out, only handles about 14 percent of the daily volume of stocks traded in the United States.
One of the biggest stock exchange operators is called BATS and is actually based in Kansas, a long way from the corner of the Wall and Broad. It was founded by a computer programmer.
Electronic trading isn't foolproof, of course, and a squirrel once famously took down the NASDAQ for about an hour and a half. But going offline at one place should mean the trading will continue unabated at any number of other marketplaces.
So it's kind of sad to admit it, but if the New York Stock Exchange closed, we wouldn't really miss it.
