How Does The New York Stock Exchange Seat System Really Work?A seat on the New York Stock Exchange represent both an equity interest in the Exchange as well as the right to access the trading facilities of the market. A Membership on the NYSE is traditionally referred to as a 'seat' because in the early year of its existence, Members sat in assigned chairs in the hall where the Exchange’s daily roll call of stocks was conducted. After a post-Civil War boom in stock trading, the Exchange adopted a system of continuous trading, replacing calls of stocks at set times with simultaneous trading of all listed stocks on a large open trading floor.
In 1868 the Exchange established a fixed number of Memberships and revised its rules to allow Members to sell their seats. After selling for as little as $4,000 in the late 1860s and early 1870s, Memberships reached $80,000 by the turn of the century, reaching a high of $625,000 during the bull market of 1929 before reaching new highs of over $1 million during the 1980s stock market boom. In 1990, a seat sold for $250,000. The highest price ever paid for a seat was $4 million on Dec. 1, 2005, followed by several seat sales at the same price. Since the late 1970s, NYSE Members have been permitted to lease seats and their assigned trading rights to qualified individuals. At the close of the market on December 30, 2005, member seat sales on the New York Stock Exchange officially ended, in anticipation of the NYSE’s plans to become a publicly traded company by way of merger with Archipelago Holdings Inc. In 2005, NYSE seat prices have reached an historic high, quadrupling from a low of $975,000 on Jan. 11 to reach a new all-time high of $4 million in early December.That is an increase of 310%! The most recent seat sale, on Dec. 29, was for $3,505,000. On Wednesday, Jan. 4, 2006, the NYSE conducted a Dutch auction for trading licenses. This gave Members and Member organizations the right to access the trading facilities of the NYSE market. Would you like to increase your trading profits? You would? Then please click here to read about this very profitable
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