The New York Stock Exchange recently announced a merger with the electronic trading network Archipelago, and Nasdaq followed that up just days later with a deal for Instinet's electronic trading network. As I argue over at Tech Central Station, the two moves spell the extinction of the Wall Street floor trader:

"In fact, the floor trader could be extinct by the year 2010: according to an informal Wall Street Journal Online survey conducted immediately after news of the NYSE-Archipelago merger broke, a majority of readers expected that the position of the Wall Street floor trader would no longer exist within five years. When that happens, the trading floor of the NYSE -- one of the last remaining places in the world where men wearing peculiar jackets wave pieces of paper in the air, run around frantically between the ringing of bells, and shout out orders into a delirious bedlam of money-making -- will become nothing more than a museum floor for 21st century capitalism, a quaint historical anachronism that failed to keep up with rapidly-changing technology and the needs of market participants."