Stock Market, New York Stock Exchange | featured news

SeaWorld Entertainment Inc.'s stock surged in its first day of trading on the New York Stock Exchange. The owner of theme parks famous for water shows featuring killer whales and dolphins jumped $5.29, or 19.6 percent, to $32.29 in afternoon trading, after the company and its backers raised $702 million.

...Today, as individual investors buy and sell common stocks less and less, the transaction symbolizes the rapidly advancing utilization of vehicles that are too esoteric for the general public to comprehend– futures contracts and options on the direction of interest rates, or oil and natural gas prices, or metals and agricultural products like wheat and corn, or precious metals like gold and silver, and especially credit instruments like mortgages and bank loans.

The New York Stock Exchange is being sold to a little-known rival in Atlanta for about $8 billion, ending more than two centuries of independence for the iconic Big Board. The buyer, IntercontinentalExchange, a 12-year-old exchange that deals in investing contracts known as futures, said Thursday that little would change for the trading floor in Manhattan's financial district.

With large portions of lower Manhattan still dark early Tuesday, U.S. stock exchanges said they were testing contingency plans to ensure trading resumes as soon as possible this week after Hurricane Sandy smashed into the East Coast.
U.S. markets will be closed for a second day, but the New York Stock Exchange said that despite reports that its historic trading floor suffered irreparable damage, no such damage has occurred and that contingency plans are being tested only as a safety measure.

The New York Stock Exchange said it will pay $5 million to resolve U.S. regulatory charges that it gave certain customers “an improper head start” on trading information.

Viacom said it is voluntarily transferring its stock-exchange listing to the Nasdaq Global Market, from the New York Stock Exchange, as Nasdaq successfully lured away one of the biggest media companies from the Big Board.

The New York Stock Exchange, an icon of American capitalism, is expected to take a crucial step toward ceding control to a German company on Thursday, with little opposition expected from investors.

US home loan giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are to cease trading on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE).