At the Nasdaq, Times Square Alliance President Tim Tompkins was scheduled to ring the opening bell, signaling the resumption of business as usual—we hope. The New York Stock Exchange, which hadn't closed for two consecutive days due to weather since 1888, was also set to open.

"Our building and systems were not damaged and our people have been working diligently to ensure that we have a smooth opening," NYSE Euronext CEO Duncan Niederauer said in a statement.

But good intentions are no guarantee of positive results. The Times reported yesterday that the New York Stock Exchange was experiencing "connectivity problems," while the Journal reported criticisms of the exchanges inadequate preparations for extreme events such as severe weather or terrorist attacks.

A few other notes from around Wall Street:

Goldman Sachs Chief Operating Officer Gary Cohn discussed the most critical operations to get up and running with Bloomberg Television yesterday: "Tomorrow is month-end ,and we are heading to the unemployment Friday and then the election is next week," he said. "The clients that really need people in the building are more of the trading clients."

Traders are leaving for work extra early to make sure they're ready for today's open, The New York Times reports.

One market pro is expecting "significant volatility" in today's trading.

AIG CEO Robert Benmosche said the company's costs related to the storm would be along the lines of costs related to Hurricane Irene. “We don’t see it as anywhere near the tsunami,” he said at a conference yesterday according to Bloomberg, referring to the tsunami that blasted Japan last year.

Citigroup's offices at 111 Wall Street will be closed for weeks, according to a memo from CEO Michael Corbat obtained by Bloomberg.

Pimco CEO Mohamed El-Erian writes of Sandy that "after an immediate negative impulse of several weeks, the impact on GDP as a whole will be mixed to slightly positive."

As previously reported, the exchange initially planned to close its physical trading floor and open on electronic systems as Hurricane Sandy battered New York City today. That decision was reversed late last night. Minutes ago, the exchange said it would remain closed tomorrow, along with other U.S. markets:

In consultation with other exchanges and market participants, NYSE Euronext (NYX) will close its markets in coordination with all U.S. equities, bonds, options and derivatives markets on Tuesday, Oct. 30, 2012.  This follows the closure of U.S. markets on Monday, Oct. 28, 2012. We intend to re-open our U.S. markets on Wednesday, Oct. 31, 2012, conditions permitting; updates will be provided tomorrow.

While Nasdaq has yet to confirm it will remain closed tomorrow, The Observer has heard from one party dissuaded by the wind and rain. Padma Lakshmi and the cast of Top Chef: Seattle were slated to ring Nasdaq's opening bell in Times Square tomorrow. That appearance will be rescheduled, a spokeswoman for the show said.

The New York Stock Exchange had planned to open trading electronically while shuttering its physical trading floor. "We are open for business and at the same time acting in accordance with actions taken by the city and state of New York," said NYSE CEO Duncan L. Niederauer said in a release yesterday afternoon.

But NYSE reversed course  last night, announcing it would halt operations completely. The exchange is closed today, and may close tomorrow, "pending confirmation," according to a release.

Nasdaq is also closed today; "it is likely that the markets will be closed" tomorrow, the exchange said in a release.

Bond markets will open, but the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association recommended that markets close at noon today.

Wall Street firms, meanwhile, have been asking nonessential staff to work from home. Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, JPMorgan and American Express are among firms to close buildings in evacuation zone A in downtown Manhattan. From a Citigroup memo published by The Times:

All staff based in Citi facilities within mandatory evacuation zones must invoke their work-from-home strategies for Monday and Tuesday unless they are in business-critical roles that have established alternative work locations. Other Citi facilities outside of mandatory evacuation zones should be accessible for critical personnel only; non-critical personnel should invoke their work-from-home strategies.

While the exchange suspended operations on the physical trading floor, all NYSE-traded securities will be trading electronically. The exchange hasn't determined when it will reopen its physical trading floor.

"We are open for business and at the same time acting in accordance with actions taken by the city and state of New York," said NYSE Euronext CEO Duncan L. Niederauer in a statement. "We have been in discussions with government officials and regulators, our trading floor community, issuers and other customers."

NYSE spokesman Rich Adamonis told The Observer that the exchange hasn't closed due to a hurricane since Hurricane Gloria rocked the East coast in 1985.

Facebook limbo: It's not lost on the Wall Street Journal that investors who bought Facebook shares on the pre-IPO market are stuck with Zuck's plummeting stock until November. (That's when the lock-up period that bars employees from selling shares in the 90 days after the IPO ends.)

Life of Aubrey: Chesapeake Energy founder and chief executive Aubrey K. McClendon leads a lavish and highly leveraged life, Reuters reports. Among the findings: Chesapeake employees charged with conducting Mr. McClendon's personal business, extensive use of company jets, sometimes for dubious business purpose, and loans against Mr. McClendon's stake in the Oklahoma City Thunder, the NBA franchise in which the Chesapeake boss is part-owner.

Winnowing: Goldman Sachs is expected to name fewer than 100 partners this year, one of the smallest classes in recent memory, the New York Times reports, as the firm shrinks staff in response to lower revenue. Goldman has cut its headcount by about 8 percent in the last year, and axed about 50 employees last week. (In 2010, Goldman named 110 partners; in 2008, at the height of the financial crisis, the firm named 94 partners.)

Whither Europe: Spain sold debt, so that was good.

When capital isn't enough: Morgan Stanley is the best-capitalized Wall Street bank. That may make regulators happy, but the firm faces the biggest ratings downgrade from Moody's and trades at the greatest discount to liquidation value.

Prosecution rests: The government is expected to conclude its case in U.S. v. Gupta today.

Occupy no more? Reuters wonders if Occupy Wall Street is over.

Can we meet in the middle? R. Allen Stanford says time served is probably enough; the government, which won a conviction against Mr. Stanford for operating a $7 billion Ponzi scheme, recommended a sentence of 230 years.

As previously noted, the exchange intends to distribute $13.7 million directly to investors—the $3 million Nasdaq sets aside each month to make good on technical glitches, plus another $10.7 million in profit earned by holding so-called "orphaned" shares through the delay.

The rest of the payback would come in the form of discounted trading fees vested over the course of six months. According to the Journal:

The company outlined three types of transactions that would qualify, including sell orders priced at or below $42 a share that didn't execute. Sell orders priced at or below $42 that didn't execute and buy orders priced at $42 that were executed but not immediately confirmed would also be considered for what Nasdaq described as "accommodations."

On Twitter, Charlie Gasparino wondered whether the New York Stock Exchange would protest the reduced fees, and the whole deal needs to be approved by the Securities and Exchange Commission.

While Nasdaq's delineation of which trades qualify for recompense offers some help, we're curious about the rest of the losses suffered during the technical malfunction. The four biggest market makers in Facebook stock—Citigroup, UBS, Citadel and Knight Capital—were said to lose as much as $115 million alone during trading delays, and totals losses have estimated between $150 and $200 million.

UPDATE: Nasdaq released its statement on the Facebook flub minutes ago. The only piece we hadn't seen in earlier reports: "Members will qualify for accommodation if: They were directly disadvantaged due to technical problems on the part of NASDAQ prior to the start of continuous trading at 11:30 a.m.; and they had uncertainty regarding their IPO cross position." Nasdaq CEO Robert Greifeld went on CNBC Maria Bartromo to apologize to the industry.

Falling out? NYSE Euronext approached Facebook yesterday about listing the company's stock on the New York Stock Exchange, a move which would be a bigger blow to Nasdaq than any punishment regulators dole out for bungling the first day in Facebook trading.

Meanwhile, plaintiffs' lawyers circled the offering, with one group filing a class-action suit asserting that Mark Zuckerberg and his bankers concealed material information from some investors. The flap arose, you'll remember, when reports surfaced that research teams at Morgan Stanley and other underwriters cut revenue guidance in the days leading up to the offering—but only shared that research with more preferred clients.

Whether those moves violated securities law falls into a gray area, the experts said. If research teams at Morgan Stanley and other investment banks cut guidance based on information in the publicly-filed S-1 document, it's likely that neither Facebook nor its bankers ran afoul of regulatory law. That doesn't mean it's good law.

Morgan Stanley CEO James Gorman took the unusual step of joining a May 17 conference call to discuss the pricing of the Facebook IPO. Facebook CFO David Ebersman sought to maximize his company's haul and limit the pop to 10 percent, unnamed sources told Bloomberg.

Top secret: Prosecutors called Byron Trott, the Goldman Sachs investment banker who landed Warren Buffett's $5 billion investment in the firm in Sept. 2008, to testify in the insider trading trial of former-McKinsey CEO Rajat Gupta. The government says that Gupta, who was a Goldman director at the time, tipped hedge fund manager Raj Rajaratnam to the Buffett deal, which Mr. Trott told the jury "was about as top secret as you can get." Discretion is not a quality lightly valued by Mr. Trott, who now runs his own investment firm. He's been known to fire underlings for talking business in the elevator, according to The New York Times.

Bankia bailout: The Spanish government will inject an additional $11 billion in Bankia SA, Spain's fourth-largest lender. That's encouraging. Economy Minister Luis de Guindos told Spanish lawmakers that Bankia "is a specific case and it's not correct to extrapolate its problems to the rest of the Spanish financial system." From this distance, that doesn't sound so reassuring.

Countdown to Grexit: A Citigroup analyst Willem Buiter is targeting Jan. 1, 2013 for Greece's exit from the eurozone. An aggressive policy response will likely keep other euro-exits, but won't stave off higher borrowing costs or recession, according to Buiter.

Big moves: Citigroup named Anthony Santomero, former president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, as chairman of its main banking subsidiary. He replaces Michael O'Neill, was in turn replaced Richard Parsons as Citigroup chairman earlier this spring.

JPMorgan is naming Joseph A. Walker senior vice chairman of its investment-banking unit. Mr. Walker spent 22 years at the bank before leaving in 2001, and led the firm's technology, media and telecommunications unit from 1998 to 2000.

Slow lane: A start-up is trying to lure mutual fund managers to a new stock exchange by prohibiting high-frequency traders.

Triple bogey: Membership fees are down at Tokyo's three top golf clubs, signaling tough times ahead for that city's commercial real estate market.

Long shot: An Australian bookie is offering 5-to-1 odds on Facebook finishing 2012 at $38 or higher.

Seems appropriate.

Occupy Wall Street grows more inventive with each new protest action and the movement's latest tactic may be well-suited to many who have, until now, followed events passively via the Internet: protesters are sacked out tonight on sidewalks  not far from the New York Stock Exchange. What's more, the concrete naps of the disaffected may have more legal protection than a tent in Zuccotti Park:

Attorney Gideon Orion Oliver says protesters are protected from arrest by a 2000 court decision that allows sleeping on sidewalks to express political views.

A spokesperson told the Associated Press that the action is already several days old.

The Sleep-out isn't actually a brand-new tactic; various Occupy movements were holding solidarity sleep-outs for the homeless in late 2011.

It does appear peaceful protest can't get much more peaceful.

Who speaks for Anonymous?

Update: It looks like some members of Anonymous were able to take the  website for the New York Stock Exchange offline for approximately two minutes. No trading was affected. A compromise, or just a failed mission? Also, what about the "no hacking on a holiday" rule??

Watch out, New York Stock Exchange! You are the next target of the hacker group Anonymous, according to a YouTube video that went up October 5th. That would be the day of Occupy Wall Street's Megamarch, though the latter group has tried to distance itself from the hacktivist community.

Oh wait: Scratch that. A video appeared this weekend, from the same YouTube account as the first message, claiming that the NYSE would not be getting hacked after all...or at least not on a holiday. But now there's an even newer video, claiming that some of Anonymous is going through with the NYSE attack. Huh?

As it turns out, different factions of Anonymous are having trouble getting together on this whole "take down the entire stock market" idea.

So is Anonymous breaking up?

This whole issue stems from one YouTube account, AnonMessage, that is apparently only owned by one individual. (It gets tricky to tell how many people are involved with Anonymous accounts, since all their messages come out in the same computerized voice.)

Nevertheless, an October 7th update apologized: they were  "mistaken" to have posted the past two videos - "Operation Invade Wall Street: A Message to the Media" and "Operation Invade Wall Street: A Message to the People" - since the messages  did not come from the "official" AnonOps headquarters.

Transcript:

Hello, citizens of the world. My name is TheAnonMessage. I speak on behalf of myself and the Anonymous collective. I would like to point out a few things regarding my channel, my mission, and the two notorious videos that were posted by me almost a week ago.

My mission is very simple: To bring viewers of YouTube easy access to documents made by fellow An ons from AnonOps in a creative yet simple form of video. I am a messenger of Anonymous just as it says in my name. I aknowledge that I am NOT the messenger of the ENTIRE collective, but I represent the majority. The documents I choose to make videos out of involve several announcements of operations, new factions, and general news and information on Anonymous. Apparently, this time, I have not been entirely successful in completing my mandate, which is to bring the people of the world general news and information on Anonymous.

The last two videos up loaded "Operation Invade Wall Street: A Message to the Media" and "Operation Invade Wall Street: A Message to the People" were part of an operation formed by a group of An ons in AnonOps which was officially called hashtag operation invade wall street.

I did not support that particular message. But as a messenger, I had to address it, thinking it was justified by AnonOps.

I was mistaken.

Therefore, I would like to state my sincere apologies to anyone who was misinformed or dismayed by any of the two videos. I am sorry if any of the two videos caused any shaken trust in either me, this channel, or the Anonymous collective. I should have known the following:

-Anonymous would never tell the people to use LOIC after it has created consequences during our attacks of Operation Payback.
-Anonymous would never issue an attack on N Y S E during a holiday, as it is completely irrelevant.
-Anonymous would find it completely unnecessary to use a Distributed Denial Of Service attack on N Y S E dot com as it does not control or contribute to any stock trade or exchange of bonds within the one percent.
-Anonymous would find it plainly stupid to announce the attack 10 days before the attack takes effect. We do usual attacks quickly and swiftly.

As of now, operation invade wall street has been terminated. Many people could still proceed with attacking N Y S E. They will do it at their own risk. I do not support this because it is dangerous and a call for massive arrests. If you wish to proceed, remember to take the necessary precautions to hide yourself. If you are not an experienced hacker, do not, and I mean this, do not get involved. You will be putting yourself into trouble. Be ware. I will keep the existing two videos as they contain annotated information that will spread throughout the embedded videos.

Then yesterday another video appeared, just to clarify that there are indeed different factions of Anonymous that might have separate goals:

Transcript:

There's been some con flict, as always. Many people refuse to accept that Operation Invade Wall Street is a reality. Some say it is a COINTELPRO agent tactic to set the map for a false flag operation.

I am here to say that I am the messenger. As the messenger, I cannot take sides. I am not supporting or opposing invade wall street, and it was wrong of me to say that the operation has been terminated.

I am here to state the message.

I am here to clarify that factions of Anonymous are going with the operation. Other factions are opposing it....

I immediately follow this information with an important message. Do not use this tool if you are easily traceable, such as when using a house router or any other personal form of internet connection.

Earlier today there was a short hack on N Y S E dot com. I am not authorized to reveal any other information other than that it was down for 30 minutes in a matter of seconds.

Those who are going to be part of the attack have a message to the N Y S E: We hack you because we don't like you.

We are all Anonymous.
We are all one Legion.
We do not forgive.
We do not forget.
N Y S E, expect those of us who plan to destroy you.

So essentially the AnonMessage account has been dealing with faulty information. Or possibly real information that it does not agree with, and some other Anonymous members might not agree with.

And this is what it looks like when a decentralized collective of Internet hackers start having organizational issues. Anonymous doesn't really work as a faceless entity to be feared if its members start airing their group's problems with the world.

Though on the plus side, the NYSE seems to be doing fine right now. Thank God for Columbus Day.

A lot feels like it's for show on the trading floor these days: The blue jackets with mesh backs recall an age of sweaty frenzy that's since been replaced by automated calm; the bits of paper, empty Splenda packets and peanut shells strewn across the floor are tiny remnants of the mountains of paper from earlier days. Instead of running around yelling at each other, most traders quietly recline in chairs. Like the blocked-off streets around Wall Street itself, the trading floor is eerily subdued and depopulated. It feels more like a weekday morning in an empty casino than the hotbed of American capitalism.

At 3:59 p.m., the football players ascended to the podium and burst into applause. To ring the closing bell—or, as it's now called, The Closing Bell®—does not actually involve ringing a bell, just pressing a button. A sustained noise between a school bell and a car alarm rang out, while the football players continued clapping. After descending from the podium, Ryan Grant, a Packers running back who had visited the NYSE when he was in high school, looked a tiny bit disappointed. "There were more people here 10 years ago!" he said.

Since 2005, when the NYSE ceased to be the financial equivalent of a public utility, few people outside of Wall Street have grasped the difference between the New York Stock Exchange as it actually is today and "the New York Stock Exchange" we think we are watching when some people in blazers rush around holding papers behind Maria Bartiromo. Take Senator Charles Schumer, who recently initiated a campaign to ensure that the new German-American company continues to have "New York Stock Exchange" in its name. Despite holding a seat on the Senate Finance Committee, Mr. Schumer recently called the NYSE "the cradle of American capitalism" and "a national treasure."

"In America," he lamentably continued, "we start each day in our Congress and in our classrooms with the Pledge of Allegiance, and we also start it with the ringing of the bell on the floor of the stock exchange."

But while Mr. Schumer gets mileage by evoking the NYSE's glory days, the reason that it is merging with the German Deutsche Boerse is because neither one actually makes a lot of money through trading stocks anymore.

"If you think of the New York Stock Exchange, you think of it trading stocks in New York and in the U.S.," said Bernard Donefer, a professor of finance at Baruch College. "That's the smallest part of its revenue."

Mr. Schumer is not the only one confused, however. At the ringing of the bell, Green Bay cornerback Charles Woodson had his own share of soaring rhetoric: "We had about 11 million viewers in the Super Bowl," he said with emotion. "But for a minute, we just controlled the world."

In fact, when he ran the closing bell last week, Charles Woodson controlled only about 27 percent of the world. That's what the New York Stock Exchange's market share of the American equities trade is today—a marked drop from the 48 percent share it had five years ago. NASDAQ, the other American stock exchange most people know, has dropped from a market share of 26 percent to 19 percent, but it still has a famous bell and a commonly known brand name.

As for the third- and fourth-largest American stock exchanges, few people outside the industry have even heard of them, probably because they are both completely automated and became exchanges less than two years ago. One is based in New Jersey and called Direct Edge ("America's newest stock exchange"), and one is based in Kansas City and called BATS. While each respectively has a 10 percent share in the U.S. equities market—and they will probably continue to grow—it's unlikely their computer warehouses will ever be the backdrop for CNBC.

When asked if Direct Edge might ever get its own bell, one equities analyst just laughed. "Maybe a virtual bell, or some kind of high-frequency bell?" he said, giggling.

To understand what happened to the NYSE we all learned about in high school, one must go back in the very distant past, all the way to 2005. Before then, for the previous 213 years, the NYSE was a member-run institution, essentially a private club whose members paid dues for the right to broker trades on the exchange.

Like a utility, it enjoyed status as a practical monopoly. As recently as 2004, some 80 percent of NYSE-listed stocks were traded on the exchange itself. That's the NYSE that Mr. Schumer is trying to "protect." But in 2005, after some high-profile proprietary-trading scandals, and a growing realization that concentrating all trading in one place was not the most efficient way to do things anymore, the S.E.C. ended the NYSE's dominance.

"These guys were basically running it to make money themselves at the expense of the overall exchange," said Charles Jones, a professor of finance at Columbia Business School. "They were doing their job as they had done it for the past 30 years—for the past 200 years, really."

When the NYSE suddenly faced competition, its very reason for existence was quickly imperiled. Unlike the NYSE, which had thousands of employees left over from its legacy days, the new guys—like BATS and Direct Edge—just needed to set up some computers; with very low overhead, it could quickly undercut the incumbents. "They're just like a little mushroom that shot up one night after a rainstorm," said Mr. Jones.

In the years that followed, the NYSE-listed stocks actually trading on the exchange itself has more than halved. For the NYSE floor traders, still trapped in the cradle of capitalism, the past five years have been grim, as lost market share was accompanied by a race to the bottom in the fees traders charge—and diminished need for humans in what increasingly became a technology business.

"As far as how we do our jobs, the market has become a lot more fragmented," said James Matthews, a broker with the Perdiue Group who has worked on the floor of the NYSE for 20 years. "There have been a lot of layoffs down here, because the margins are so thin now." 

The merger will do little to ease their predicament. Under the new combined company (as yet unnamed), the largest chunk of revenue, an estimated 37 percent, will come from trading and clearing derivatives, particularly European futures.

So what is it that we're watching on CNBC these days? It's basically an advertisement-a way for companies going public to debut themselves to millions of investors watching daytime television. The NYSE still has a thriving listing business. As Michael Wong, an equity analyst at Morningstar, put it, "To an extent, just having that floor open, that's however many free million dollars in free advertising every year."

ewitt@observer.com