Nyse, Stock Market | featured news

SeaWorld Entertainment Inc.'s stock surged in its first day of trading on the New York Stock Exchange. The owner of theme parks famous for water shows featuring killer whales and dolphins jumped $5.29, or 19.6 percent, to $32.29 in afternoon trading, after the company and its backers raised $702 million.

Shares of Pinnacle Foods Inc (PF.N), owner of the Birds Eye and Duncan Hines brands, rose 13.7 percent in their New York Stock Exchange debut on Thursday. The stock was trading at $22.73 after the company backed by Blackstone Group LP (BX.N) raised $580 million in its initial public offering.

...Today, as individual investors buy and sell common stocks less and less, the transaction symbolizes the rapidly advancing utilization of vehicles that are too esoteric for the general public to comprehend– futures contracts and options on the direction of interest rates, or oil and natural gas prices, or metals and agricultural products like wheat and corn, or precious metals like gold and silver, and especially credit instruments like mortgages and bank loans.

The New York Stock Exchange is being sold to a little-known rival in Atlanta for about $8 billion, ending more than two centuries of independence for the iconic Big Board. The buyer, IntercontinentalExchange, a 12-year-old exchange that deals in investing contracts known as futures, said Thursday that little would change for the trading floor in Manhattan's financial district.

Facebook joins the Nasdaq-100 Index, a move accelerated by the departure of Infosys, which is moving to the New York Stock Exchange.

The New York Stock Exchange said it will pay $5 million to resolve U.S. regulatory charges that it gave certain customers “an improper head start” on trading information.

The exchange operators extended the deadline for completing their planned tie-up to March 31 while European competition authorities continue an in-depth probe of the deal.

Viacom said it is voluntarily transferring its stock-exchange listing to the Nasdaq Global Market, from the New York Stock Exchange, as Nasdaq successfully lured away one of the biggest media companies from the Big Board.

Nasdaq OMX has stepped up its opposition to the planned merger between NYSE Euronext and Deutsche Börse and said the deal would "irrevocably destroy" competition in Europe's listed-derivatives markets, just as the European Commission nears a decision on the tie-up.

The top executive of NYSE Euronext said a critical European Union review of the company's agreed-upon tie-up with Deutsche Börse will likely result in conditions being placed on the combined company, rather than an outright block of the deal.