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NYSE Equities Trading Floor to Partially Reopen on May 26

The venue consulted with health experts and government officials to develop safety measures and rules to prevent transmission.

NYSE Equities Trading Floor to Partially Reopen on May 26
Traders work next to a hand sanitizing station on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange in New York, U.S.. Photographer: Michael Nagle/Bloomberg

(Bloomberg) -- The New York Stock Exchange will partially open its trading floor May 26 with a small contingent of floor brokers in protective masks, NYSE President Stacey Cunningham wrote in a Wall Street Journal op-ed.

“We opted to close our floor temporarily in the early days of the pandemic,” she wrote in the piece posted Thursday. “Two months later, we’ve learned a lot and are in a position to reopen the floor with vital new safety measures, as we begin working together to restart the U.S. economy.”

The venue consulted with health experts and government officials to develop safety measures and rules to prevent transmission of Covid-19, she said. Those will include screening brokers and visitors and requiring they abstain from public transit. Designated market makers will continue to operate remotely, with limited exceptions, the exchange said in a notice to traders.

The move is another incremental step toward reopening Wall Street’s offices and venues, which have been relying on skeleton crews as well as staff stationed remotely, often at makeshift terminals at home. The NYSE’s Arca Options trading floor in San Francisco partially reopened earlier this month, offering lessons that can be applied in New York. Yet many securities firms have said that returning to full staffing will take months at the least as they work out logistics.

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