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The NYSE Specialist System: How Floor Trading Used to Work

Wall Street Mechanics — The Insider Curriculum • Beginner Investing • 7 min

For nearly 200 years, trading a specific stock on the New York Stock Exchange meant going through a specific individual: the specialist, physically stationed at a designated post on the actual trading floor, responsible for maintaining what regulators called a "fair and orderly market" in one or more assigned stocks. This wasn't a passive role — a core specialist responsibility was actively smoothing out temporary…

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