Taxing the Tape

Because of the Northeast's blizzard, the New York Stock Exchange held an abbreviated session one day last week, with the result that trading for the day amounted to only 6,400,000 shares.

Even that would have been unusually brisk as recently as 1965, but not any more. In the early weeks of 1967, Wall Street has seen Big Board stocks change hands faster than ever before.

Trading, merely hectic last year, has turned almost frantic. So far this year, market volume has averaged 9,900,000 shares a day v. last year's record daily average of 7,500,000 shares. In all, volume has reached 10 million shares on no fewer than 18 of the year's 29 trading days.

The upsurge in trading is in part a seasonal phenomenon: because of year-end tax-loss selling and bonuses, many investors are left with money for buying stocks. And last year's stock-market plunge left a number of issues at bargain prices. Showing renewed confidence in the economy, large institutional buyers have charged back into the market, an example that has encouraged individual investors to do the same.

In the long run, there is little doubt that the U.S. public's affluence, population growth and ever-increasing interest in stocks have made big-volume trading more or less permanent. At least Wall Street is acting on that assumption. Bache & Co., for example, has acquired a Univac 494 geared to a 20 million-shares-a-day market. When that day comes, it will be interesting to see how the New York Stock Exchange itself chooses to cope with it. On busy days, its two-year-old ticker already flashes stock transactions as fast as the human eye can read them--and yet this year it has run as many as 19 minutes behind.

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