New York Stock Exchange to be sold to IntercontinentalExchange for $8.2B

The owner of the New York Stock Exchange, NYSE Euronext, said today that it is selling itself to competitor IntercontinentalExchange, for $8.2 billion, the New York Times reported. The new company will maintain dual headquarters in Atlanta, where ICE is based, and New York.

The sale of the 195-year-old NYSE to an electronic commodity trading exchange that was founded only 12 years ago underscores the declining relevance of the iconic stock exchange, according to the Guardian.

The all-electronic Nasdaq and other more technically astute exchanges have chipped away at the NYSE’s market share since the 1990s, and now Chicago’s CME is the dominant exchange in the US, the Guardian reported.

"The NYSE has faded in the past few years, for most professionals this is a sign of the times,” Charles Geisst, a finance professor at Manhattan College, told the Guardian. “Trading could take place on the moon right now as long as you have the right communications."

It’s expected that Thursday’s deal will go through, unlike previous merger attempts that were blocked by regulators, The New York Times reported.

Last year, the US Justice Dept. blocked an $11 billion hostile takeover attempt by ICE and the Nasdaq OMX Group; this past February, European antitrust regulators said no to a merger of NYSE Euronext and Germany’s Deutsche Börse, the New York Times reported.

More from GlobalPost: EU regulators block giant financial exchange merger

According to the New York Times, "ICE and NYSE Euronext have little overlap: the former focuses on the trading of commodities like energy products, the latter on stocks and derivatives."