Thain reassured members during the conference that he was not abandoning the floor trading system.

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The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission was mulling rule changes that threatened to put its 212-year-old floor trading system at a severe disadvantage to electronic rivals.

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There are some fully electronic trading firms looking to hedge their bets on the demise of the floor-trading system.

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NYSE's floor-based trading system, in which shares are bought and sold through a few firms known as specialists.

ECONOMIST: American stock exchanges

The combination enables the integration of voice data into Bloomberg Vault to produce electronic records in near real-time, and it will work with any existing trading floor recording system.

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Members would give up their seats at the NYSE, which would then develop a licensing system for distributing floor trading rights.

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While originally designed to protect regional exchanges from the NYSE, in practice it has protected the NYSE, with its floor-based open-outcry trading system, from new electronic exchanges.

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Speed is certainly the reason by NYSE bought Archipeligo Holdings last year and made changes that have meant the elimination of most of the specialist brokers who once crowded the floor in favor of a new electronic trading system that only pumps trades to human brokers when there is high volatility.

FORBES: Crank Up The Volume

Eurodollars were still trading on the floor in the open outcry system, and a Parisian interloper called Euronext Liffe saw an opening.

FORBES: Up From the Pits

With new regulations favoring automation-- and indeed the NYSE has its own plan to push greater automation on the trading floor-- the future of the specialist system has been called into doubt.

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