TRUMBULL, Connecticut -- John Hickey is dwarfed by triple stacks of blinking monitors that display the future of capitalism.
"We drive the marketplace through these consoles here," says the chief technology officer and vice president of the Nasdaq Stock Market.
In a spotless neighboring room, rows and rows of server towers stand like a small city of white and beige skyscrapers under the low hum of an air-conditioning system.
The Nasdaq lacks a trading floor because it doesn't need one. The market of choice for technology companies is entirely digital. The company runs the exchange out of a whimsical glass-and-steel building in a bland industrial park two hours away from Wall Street.
Despite its distance from the physical center of the financial world, there's plenty of action. On Monday, the exchange's US$50 million worth of hardware handled one of the busiest trading days ever when the Nasdaq Composite Index rose 37.48 to a record 2040.64.
Nasdaq may lack the clamor and bell-ringing traditions of the New York Stock Exchange, but at market opening the consoles next to Hickey stage their own drama.
In the seconds before trading begins, the system idles at about 10 percent of capacity. But the instant the market opens, at 9:30 a.m. EST, bar graphs on one monitor skyrocket up from the bottom of the screen, changing from white to flashing red, as the system's Tandem computers are slammed with millions of simultaneous bids, offers, and sales.
For half an hour, says Hickey, the machines run at 90 percent of capacity until the opening peak subsides. That represents more than 5 million trades per minute, with an average daily volume during the 390-minute trading day of 780 million trades.
Spikes in the market -- as when the Nasdaq climbed impressively in recent weeks -- pushed the system to just short of a billion trades each day. When the market plummeted on 24 October 1997, more than 1.375 billion transactions were processed, causing some damage to the Unisys servers that run the whole operation.
The servers were repaired the same day, but the glitch underscores why the Nasdaq is always undergoing some type of technology upgrade.
Indeed, the Nasdaq has one of the most elaborate contingency plans in the world.
"We have what we call 'N-plus-two reliability.' The system has a backup system, and the backup has a backup," says Hickey.
That means backups not only to power the hundreds of processors executing trades deep within the Nasdaq's computers, but, just as vitally, the cooling system that keeps the computers from overheating.
