NYSE reopens after superstorm

Associated Press

NEW YORK

The New York Stock Exchange will open today — because it had to open.

In a bit of welcome news for fund managers, investors and even the economy, the company that operates the iconic exchange at 11 Wall Street announced it would not extend its trading shutdown to a third day.

Wall Street experts had feared that another delay because of Hurricane Sandy would have meant a dangerous back-up of customer orders to buy and sell stock. It also could have dealt a blow to the image of U.S. markets, already damaged by investor distrust, sudden market swings and a series of trading glitches, including the botched IPO of Facebook.

“The world is used to seeing the financial markets through the lens of the floor of the New York Stock Exchange,” said Larry Leibowtiz, chief operating officer of NYSE Euronext, which operates the exchange. “It gives them a sense of comfort.”

The New York Stock Exchange said its building and trading floor are fully operational and that normal trading will resume today at the usual starting time of 9:30 a.m. Since power is out in much of downtown Manhattan, the company said it will run the exchange using its own backup generators, a first.

The closing Tuesday marked the first time since 1888 that the NYSE halted trading for two consecutive days because of weather. As the NYSE staff scrambled Tuesday to make sure that that 124-year record wouldn’t be surpassed by another day of delay, there were reports on the Internet that the exchange floor had flooded.

It was a false alarm.

The exchange also said that a key data center in New Jersey housing computers used to trade stocks was in good condition after the storm and would be fully up and running today.

Mark Travis, president of Intrepid Capital Funds in Jacksonville Beach, Fla., said he was worried that the longer markets remained closed, the greater the backlog of pending trades that would need to be cleared when normal trading resumed.

“You build up pressure when you keep people out of the markets,” Travis said. “Trading volume that may normally happen in a two-day period could get compressed into an hour or two when markets reopen.”

Add to that Hurricane Sandy’s timing, which was awful for the exchange. Instead of arriving on a weekend when the exchange is closed, it blasted into Manhattan on a Monday, and the start of a crucial week, too.

This week is the last full one before the presidential election. What’s more, the government publishes a key report Friday that traders like to bet ahead of — October’s unemployment figures.