NYSE Planning More High-Tech Features

The New York Stock Exchange said Thursday it would offer a new package of trading technology products, designed to offer different ways to carry out stock trades, by the middle of next year.

“What we are doing . . . is creating a marketplace that for the first time, under one roof, will have all of the elements of executional choice, ranging from automated execution to traditional open outcry,” Richard Grasso said in a media briefing on the Big Board’s new trading floor, which is set to open by early December.

The NYSE set a timeline on the introduction of these new products, known collectively as Network NYSE, following a meeting of its board of directors. Network NYSE is the Big Board’s response to the rise of high technology alternative-trading systems that have threatened to take market share from the world’s largest stock exchange.

The Big Board plans to introduce one of its new products, which automatically executes limit orders up to 1,099 shares, this month. Full implementation of this system, called NYSE Direct, is set for the first quarter of 2001.