NYSE President Lynn Martin spoke at CNBC’s Squad Workbox on January 22, 2025 outside the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.
Jerry Miller | CNBC
The great American entrepreneur Henry Ford once said, “The only real safety that a person can have in this world is his knowledge, experience and ability.” In examining recent volatility in global financial markets from my perch as president of the New York Stock Exchange, I think this concept is just as true today as it was 100 years ago.
233 years later, the New York Stock Exchange continues to be the heart of the global financial system. Over the past few weeks, the faces of our trading floors have been seen at the forefront of newspapers from New York to Tokyo. Our real-time market data is constantly displayed across television news and social media.
From my conversations with investors from daily retailers to the world’s largest asset managers, I fully understand the challenges posed by recent market disruptions.
But apart from the ups and downs of our market, Americans should be certain of other trends from recent weeks. The infrastructure and operational practices that underpin our market are the world’s vy hopes and meet the challenges posed by recent volatility.
The US market has come from a humble beginning. The New York Stock Exchange was launched in 1792 by a group of 24 stockbrokers who encountered outdoors under buttonwood trees. It evolved from a structure once dominated by people who called out “buy” or “sell” to a structure that today fuses the best human judgments that interact with cutting edge technology.
Since April 3, designated market makers have manually managed opening and closing auctions at more than double the usual rates to reduce extreme volatility in the market. This flexibility inherent to this model has driven greater engagement from market participants by increasing NYSE opening and closing auctions by over 20% and handling trading activities of over $32 billion per day.
We’ve also seen our system clear more efficiently and calm the deals down than last time we had our battle tested. Following the sale of the Covid-19 market, the exchange industry has accelerated its time to resolve transactions from two days to a day.
With dramatic shaking in the Dow, S&P 500 and other major indexes, the US exchange has absorbed a record number of transactions and volumes. The New York Stock Exchange has attacked three exchanges in the last seven days, a record amount of trading. On April 9th, he reached its peak, holding hands with over 30 billion shares.
On April 7th and April 9th, we processed over a trillion incoming orders to buy and sell stocks in one day. In a different way, efficient certainty of implementation is more important than ever from a risk management perspective, and the ecosystem has taken this opportunity to rise.
Amidst the great uncertainty, our markets have given investors the freedom to consume global events, make investment decisions and execute trades at unparalleled speed and accuracy.
It’s no coincidence that our system is working. This is a system we have built and refined for over two centuries. We are constantly making immeasurable investments in technology. We innovate our teams. We prepare for every crisis we can imagine.
In these moments of uncertainty, we are constantly leading the North Star to protect the integrity of the infrastructure of the US market. We rely on knowledge reserves and experience to maintain the US status as the world’s largest and most robust financial market for market strength and resilience and collective efforts from the financial industry.
When it comes to risk management and what it takes to run the world’s largest and most robust market, Henry Ford has done it right.
