EthicsBite™

Yesterday’s Sunday New York Times’ business section featured a lengthy article on the proposed takeover of the New York Stock Exchange by an Atlanta based company with the unfortunate three letter acronym of ICE. Here are parts of this story that caught my attention.

ICE, the IntercontinentalExchange, is located in a modest, nondescript office building in Atlanta. There are not enough employees working there to fill the building – at least two other companies have marquees out front. ICE personnel eat their lunch in the same cafeteria with those other companies’ employees. The small personnel footprint is a direct result of the computer based management of the exchanges that ICE already has. This fact has caused anxiety among the traders on the floor of the NYSE who still handle the orders.

While ICE founder and CEO Jeffrey Sprecher maintains that he knows investors will still want a human being on the other end of the phone overseeing the trading, I doubt that he will need as many such people physically present on the pricey NYSE trading floor as opposed to sitting at computers in Atlanta or anywhere else. In short the computer leverage that is already a powerful force in the trading process is likely to increase.

At the same time, Sprecher recognizes that the flash crashes that occasionally occur with individual stocks and less frequently with an entire market, are not a good thing for the long haul. According to the Times’ story, ICE “has been praised as one of the first exchanges to put limits on lightning-quick, high-frequency trading.” Having that mind-set at the helm should be welcomed by investors, and would lend some hope to addressing the ethical issues of high-frequency trading that we have discussed in a prior post.