Tokyo Traders Mark New Era

It was a down day on the Tokyo stock market in more ways than one - it lost points, and something else - that human touch. CBS News Correspondent Barry Petersen reports.

There was more celebration than wake - but this was, in fact, the death of an era: the last day that trades on the Tokyo Stock Exchange would be made person-to-person.

Instead, computers will match buyers and sellers, which is the way its being done in most other stock markets these days.

On Friday, after the end of the trading day, it was the site of a closing ceremony replete with confetti and party noisemakers.

The floor long ago stopped being the center of trading activity. Securities companies began switching to faster and more reliable electronic trading systems in the early 1980s.

By last year, all Japanese stocks could be traded by computer, while fewer than 10 percent could be traded directly on the floor. Only about 100 employees still worked on the floor. Trading there accounted for a scant 0.2 percent of Tokyo volume.

The huge open floor of the 120-year-old Tokyo exchange was once crowded with more than 2,000 traders. The Tokyo exchange was never one for fast-moving modernization. Traders liked doing deals by elaborate hand signals and watchful eyes.

But even the Japanese can see there's no future holding on to the past. Computers are cheaper, more efficient, more accurate - too bad for people.

Floor trading is still done in New York and Frankfurt, but other major exchanges have gone completely electronic.

Since 1986, stock exchanges in Hong Kong, Singapore, London, and Paris have closed their trading floors.

The show is still going on at the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. The exchange says it has no intention of replacing real people working on a real floor who can do what no computer will ever match -- cheer the good days and endure the bad ones.

The huge Tokyo trading floor, with its 165-foot-high ceiling, will be remodeled for use as a stock and corporate information center.