ABSTRACT
Interestingly, a new range of electronic trading systems for national and international stock exchanges are also emerging which are not physically confined to the trading floor and which take place within electronic spaces. These are accessible nationally and internationally in real time, and erode further the spatial and temporal limitations on stock market activity. To Salsbury (1992; 27) such systems ‘threaten almost every aspect of world security markets’. The best developed of these, the National Association of Securities Dealers Automated Quotation System (NASDAQ) is actually now the third largest stock market in the world, after New York and Tokyo. London has also developed its SEAQ system and Chicago has set up a system known as GLOBEX, which allows electronic trading of stocks outside normal trading hours from anywhere in the world (Budd, 1994). Because these networks do not have a physical presence and are accessible irrespective of locations, there has been some speculation that they may even out the financial landscapes or even ‘end the geography’ of financial transactions altogether (Budd, 1994). While they may undermine the competitive position of the big financial centres, it remains doubtful, however, whether they will really challenge the territorial concentrations of global financial markets within the global command centres. The complex and selfreinforcing advantages of these centres seem too strong and the ultimate logic of electronic trading networks seems to be one of extending the reach of these cities rather than undermining their prominence. To quote Leslie Budd, ‘even where electronic trading systems appear to overcome the constraint of locality, one finds that their development and that of global alliances between exchanges is informed by notions of territory and territoriality’ (Budd, 1994; 24).
