You are 100% correct Blackred! The situation in New York/Wall Street is far from back to normal and has a way to go yet until it is restored to even 50% capacity. Anyone who thinks otherwise hasn't turned a TV on nor read the news.
NEW YORK (MarketWatch) — Wall Street is back in business, but it’s not quite business as usual, with much of Manhattan’s financial district still in the dark Thursday and many market participants unable to get there in any case.
“The fact is there is limited manpower; not all the traders have access to trading,” said Peter Cardillo, chief market economist at Rockwell Global Capital, who questions the New York Stock Exchange’s decision to reopen Wednesday, two days after Hurricane Sandy hit.
The NYSE “should never have opened up,” said Cardillo, who went to work Wednesday after hearing trading would resume.
Cardillo found his office in lower Manhattan’s financial district, along with the rest of the area, closed and in the dark.
“The only building lit up was the New York Stock Exchange,” said Cardillo who then spent four and a half hours walking back to his home near the Verrazano Bridge in southwest Brooklyn.
And, while the NYSE managed to reopen with the help of back-up generators, not all trading houses were as able.
“Knight Trading had to shut down for want of electricity,” said Art Hogan, market strategist at Lazard Capital Markets, of reports that Knight Capital Group , which reportedly stopped taking orders Wednesday due to a power outage at its Jersey City headquarters.
The Jersey City market maker had been operating on backup generators since Sandy hit, but lost power around 11:45 a.m. Eastern Wednesday, according to a memo obtained by multiple media outlets.
But Kara Fitzsimmons, a spokeswoman for Knight, said the generators were restarted about 2 p.m. Wednesday with the help of battery power.
“Knight never lost power to its critical trading systems due to double redundancies built into its system,” Fitzsimmons said in an email.
In a cautionary move, “a decision was made to instruct clients to route away. We resumed limited trading after generators were restored,” she added.
Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Citadel Group were among the firms to benefit with increased trading volume during Knight’s down period, according to a report by Bloomberg News.
The trouble compounded a difficult time for Knight, which was among the market makers to lose millions due to technical troubles at Nasdaq during Facebook Inc.’s initial public offering. Knight was rescued by outside investors after losing $440 million as a result of the misfires in its internal trading system.
The resumption of trade Wednesday came on the final day of the month, typically a heavier-than-usual volume day on Wall Street. But on Wednesday, that was not the case.
Trading was impacted “like any business. You’d hope we’d have pent-up demand to make up for investments, but you didn’t see three days of trading wrapped into one yesterday,” said Hogan at Lazard.
The primary factor behind what appeared to be another relatively low volume trading day on Thursday is “we can’t get all the players back to work,” said Hogan, who typically spends most of his work week in Manhattan, but this week was working from Lazard’s Boston office.