Stocks index closed up today, albeit by just a fraction.
The market’s big mover was, well, the industry that runs the markets — IntercontinentalExchange‘s (ICE) $8.2 billion purchase of NYSE Euronext (NYX). The deal pushed NYSE’s stock up 34% on the day, while ICE’s stock closed up 1.4%.
Shares of CME Group (CME) were down 2.3%; perhaps investors were thinking along the same lines as our own Steve Sears, who thinks the ICE-NYSE tie-up could ultimately spell trouble for CME.
There were other takes on the deal: David Weidner argues that ICE bought NYSE largely for the cachet that comes with owning the Big Board, while Felix Salmon believes the deal shows us how little the NYSE actually matters:
To get an idea of the degree to which stock trading is a complete afterthought in this deal, look at yesterday�s big merger announcement that Getco is buying Knight [Capital Group (KCG)]. That deal is valued at $1.4 billion, or about 17% of the price being paid for NYSE Euronext. And in many ways the new Getco-Knight combination is going to be bigger and more important, when it comes to stock trading, than the NYSE Group.
To put it another way: we�re living in a world where stock traders have become stock exchanges (both Getco and Knight control massive �dark pools�), while stock exchanges have become derivatives exchanges where the equities business is basically a high-profile, low-profit branding exercise.
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