The Last Days of Stock Traders?

Oct. 6, 2006 — -- The latest and greatest hybrid has nothing to do with an upgrade in fuel-friendly cars.

It's all about stocks, and it'll offer a big change in the way they're traded at the 214-year-old New York Stock Exchange.

Friday marks the first time in history that the trading specialists who scurry around on the world's most famous trading floor compete with a computer.

Their indecipherable language and frenetic pace have been staples of the trading action at the NYSE since its inception.

So now, could the traders be replaced by a computer?

Here's how it works: If you want to buy shares of a company, say American Express, you will now be offered the option of choosing a machine to execute the order rather than a human.

Officials at the stock exchange say it takes a human broker an average of nine seconds to move the shares, but a computer can do it in a little less than a second.

That's a big difference in the markets when every millisecond equals money.

When the exchange ran a test of the new system on a recent Saturday, more than 6 billion shares changed hands in just two hours.

That's more than twice what trading specialists traded in the busiest day in NYSE history.

When the new system went into effect Friday, only two stocks, American Express and Property Equity Trust, were available for computer trades.

The exchange says that by December all of its 2,700 stocks will offer the man-versus-machine option, but NYSE adds the both can live happily side-by-side.

But that might not be the case.

When the London Stock Exchange introduced a similar hybrid system in 1986, the specialists disappeared just a few weeks later.