The New York Stock Exchange will partially reopen its normally crowded trading floor later this month after closing it in late March due to the coronavirus.
Stacey Cunningham, president of the NYSE, said Thursday the trading floor will reopen to a subset of brokers the day after the Memorial Day holiday.
The brokers that are allowed to return will have to wear protective masks and follow social-distancing requirements, Cunningham said in a commentary published in The Wall Street Journal.
Employees of large companies that normally crowd the NYSE trading floor as they oversee the action will largely continue to work remotely, as they have been since March 23, when the NYSE shifted to all-electronic trading as a precautionary step after two people tested positive for COVID-19.
Several thousand brokers and others used to crowd the trading floor of the NYSE as recently as the 1990s. But in the years since, the rise of electronic trading grew to dominate the action on Wall Street. These days, there are about 500 floor traders at the NYSE.