Credit:
http://www.philly.com/philly/business/20...xchange_is_relocating_again.html?photo_2
The next move - from its 34-year home at 1900 Market St. to three floors of the 49-story FMC Tower at Cira South at 2929 Walnut - fits the market's growing role in the business of trading stock-options contracts, which investors use to bet on whether a stock will rise or fall.
To be sure, as an employer, the Philadelphia exchange (PHLX), now a unit of Nasdaq Inc., is smaller than it used to be, with 140 staff and about 80 market-makers, brokers, and specialists on its shrunken trading floor on a given day, down from hundreds of staff and 505 trading members in the early 2000s.
But that's true for old-style exchanges everywhere. As securities trading has moved online, serving global customers at remote locations, the PHLX's last regional-exchange peers, in Boston and San Francisco, have shut down. The mighty New York Stock Exchange is a subdued remnant of its old self.
Yet the PHLX, the nation's oldest securities market, endures. Nasdaq made veteran PHLX software developer Thomas A. Wittman's tech team the core of its expanded options business when it bought the exchange for $652 million in 2006.
Once the options industry's smallest player, it is now the largest, by trading volume, of the 14 stock-options trading platforms tracked by Chicago-based Options Clearing Corp. The PHLX handles nearly 20 percent of the industry's total volume of about 12.5 million contracts a day.
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