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The New York Stock Exchange plans to open a private members’ club on Wall Street as it jostles to win a flurry of huge public offerings for private US tech groups.
The world’s biggest exchange is preparing for a summer launch of a new invite-only club set up in a renovated vault that formerly housed stock certificates, according to two people familiar with the matter.
NYSE Group president Lynn Martin will have the final say on which financial luminaries make the cut, one of the people said. NYSE declined to comment.
The opening of the club is set to come just as Wall Street gears up for the expected initial public offerings of Elon Musk’s rocket maker SpaceX and AI start-ups Anthropic and OpenAI.
The trio are tipped to raise tens of billions of dollars when they come to market. SpaceX’s IPO is expected as soon as June and could value the group at $1.75tn, the largest flotation of all time.
None of the three companies has yet stated whether they plan to list on NYSE, which was acquired by Intercontinental Exchange in 2013, or Nasdaq, its tech-heavy rival. Up for grabs are boasting rights and hundreds of thousands of dollars in annual listing fees.
“Historically speaking, the bigger companies always wanted to be on NYSE, you’d be somebody,” said Joseph Saluzzi, partner and co-founder at Themis Trading.
Nasdaq is battling to shift the balance of power, and last month enacted sweeping changes to its index inclusion methodology that would direct billions of dollars in passive investments towards large newly public companies that list on its exchange.
Walmart’s decision last year to switch its listing from NYSE to Nasdaq made it the biggest company by market value to cross the aisle.
A person familiar with the matter said NYSE’s plans to start a members’ club were unrelated to this year’s landmark IPOs.
Members’ clubs were a fixture on Wall Street for much of the 20th century, offering martinis, consommé and quiet rooms to traders hoping to strike deals away from the hubbub of the open outcry pits where financial contracts were once settled.
NYSE’s infamous Stock Exchange Luncheon Club — which was founded in 1898 and added its first women’s bathroom 89 years later — was among traders’ favoured haunts until it closed in 2006. Electronic trading had by then all but replaced face-to-face commerce.
“It was high society and a big deal to get invited, I wore a three-piece suit and shined my shoes,” said Bill Singer, a former attorney at the American Stock Exchange who frequented the Luncheon Club in the 1980s.
“The food was not memorable. The atmosphere was hush-hush. [Henry] Kissinger stopped by one time.”
TS Lombard’s chief US economist Steven Blitz also visited the club, as a guest, in the late 1980s. “It was beautiful,” he said. “Amazing blanched wood floors, deer heads on the walls, club sandwiches and roast chicken for lunch.”
New York’s financial centre of gravity has over the past 30 years shifted from Wall Street in the financial district to Midtown, where Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan and other major institutions have their headquarters.
Exchanges have over the same period repositioned as market data companies rather than businesses focused on matching buyers and sellers, with NYSE’s share of US equity trading having plunged since the turn of the century amid competition from new exchanges and private “dark pools” for institutional traders. Changing work habits have, meanwhile, done away with the culture of boozy lunches.
NYSE’s efforts to replicate the Luncheon Club’s magic and coax financiers away from the likes of Colette Club and Aman uptown may fall short as a result, Singer added.
The Buttonwood Club of senior NYSE members, organised in 1962 and named after the Buttonwood Agreement that founded the exchange in 1792, declined to comment.
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