A clanging glory: New York Stock Exchange bell ringers use pageantry to promote companies (2024)

It’s the 10 seconds that wakes up Wall Street, and the 15 seconds that puts it to bed.

The brassy clang of the New York Stock Exchange’s opening and closing bells has become one of the most enduring symbols of the America’s capital markets.

It’s also become a can’t-miss experience on whistle-stop tours for corporate leaders, visiting dignitaries, superstar athletes and out-of-place celebrities. What better way to mark their standing in the business world than to perch above the exchange floor and press a button that says trading in New York has begun?

It is with some wonder then that, in an era when high-speed technology and competition have reshaped and depopulated once-packed exchanges, a simple brass bell remains the clinking heart of Wall Street.

Chalk it up to its symbolic might.

Because unlike the bygone ticker-tape machine or Quotron devices, the bell still exerts a certain pull on the popular imagination.

As a result, it’s become a sought-after honor. There’s no charge to ring the bell, but getting a slot takes some patience. The exchange is booked with requests into next year, NYSE Euronext spokesman Richard Adamonis said.

“We can have requests three to four deep to ring the bell on a given day,” said Scott Cutler, executive vice president of global listings, the group that manages the exchange’s relationships with about 2,100 listed companies.

So popular are the New York Stock Exchange’s bell ringings that its crosstown rival, the Nasdaq Stock Market, began running its own ceremonies in 1997, and made them a regular feature in the year 2000. Its bells sound more like chimes, while the exchange, unlike the NYSE, gives ringers the opportunity for a short speech beforehand.

Many of NYSE’s bell ringers hail from companies listed on the exchange. Or else they represent products put out by these companies. Such was the case when the actor Robert Downey Jr. and the superhero Iron Man showed up in April: Exchange member the Walt Disney Co. owns Marvel Entertainment, producer of the summer blockbuster “Iron Man 3.”

That was also the reason why the storied exchange let sea otters and penguins roam the trading floor in April: the animals’ owner, SeaWorld Entertainment, was there to celebrate its initial public offering on the NYSE. And last week, exchange officials, some on motorcycles, traveled out to Harley-Davidson’s hometown of Milwaukee for a “remote bell” to commemorate the company’s 110th anniversary.

Major New Jersey companies, from Prudential Financial to Johnson & Johnson to Honeywell International, also have joined the festivities.

“We use the bell to essentially promote their businesses,” Cutler said.

But there are also feel-good events and ones to honor heroes. The Make-A-Wish Foundation has arranged for children with terminal illnesses to ring the bell. Perhaps one of the most powerful ceremonies was on Sept. 17, 2001, when the city’s first responders helped ring the markets back open just blocks away from the still smoldering ruins of the World Trade Center.

Ringing in a new tradition

It wasn’t always like this. For more than 90 years after the New York Stock Exchange adopted the bell in 1903, sounding it was largely a perfunctory task performed by one of the exchange’s floor directors. Since the 1950s there have been occasional guest ringers, but for the most part it was a duty without glamour.

When Dick Grasso took over as the NYSE’s chief executive in mid-1990s, he and other officials decided it was time for the world’s most influential stock market to shed some of its mystery and open itself more to the public, said Adamonis.

That meant letting media broadcast on the exchange floor for the first time and lining up guest bell-ringers to open and close the market each day.

“Part of what we were hoping to do back in 1995 was to make Wall Street more accessible, more understandable to the public, to take that wall down that existed in some ways,” he said.

Another part was tactical. Doing so would help the NYSE tout its own brand as the center of the business universe, Adamonis noted.

Much of the time, the ceremonies are low-key events, featuring a company or guest that’s far from a household name. But every now and then the floor will be invaded by the like of the rock band Kiss, the villain Darth Vader or the cast of “Jersey Shore.” Sport legends are another common sight, and the occasional world leader such as U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon will pass through.

Traders have embraced this new tradition, greeting bell ringers with cheers and applause.

Some now ask notable guests to autograph pairs of oversized, foam-rubber Incredible Hulk fists. They've gathered 250 signatures so far from luminaries ranging from football's Jerry Rice to Disney's Bob Iger to actor Sean Connery, though they skipped the "Jersey Shore" cast. The hope is one day to auction the fists for charity.

The Gong Show

Before the exchange had its bells, it used a gong. That’s a tradition still in vogue in Amsterdam’s stock exchange.

The bells are rung from a podium on the balcony above the exchange’s main floor. To get to it, you must go up a small flight of steps past the Starbucks and a security gate.

Ringers press a green button to sound the bells, one of which is semi-hidden in a mesh cage on the wall behind the balcony. The bell is about the size of a large pizza.

The podium also has an orange button, to signal temporary pauses in trading, and a red one to serve as backup in case the green button fails. A gavel sits next to the red button, and it is used to punctuate the close of the market.

Visitors to the balcony are reminded not to touch the buttons. That’s a lesson Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu learned on a visit to the exchange in the early 2000s, when he or a member of his coterie set off the bells by accident in the middle of a trading session.

While the markets no longer depend on the bell to open and close trading, the tradition of ringing it shows no sign of fading. They will continue on even after the NYSE’s pending takeover by the IntercontinentalExchange, an upstart electronic rival with no bell from Atlanta, is complete.

“Our market doesn’t change,” Adamonis, the NYSE spokesman, said. “The brand, the bell. It’ll be the same.”

A dramatic trip to the close

Even with all of its stagecraft, sometimes a bell-ringing ceremony gets infused with real-life drama.

On August 22, executives and directors of Unity Bancorp, a small community bank based in the Hunterdon County town of Clinton, hopped on a rented bus and headed for Times Square.

Their destination was the Nasdaq Stock Market, which lists the bank’s stock and runs its own bell ceremonies. Unity, which had booked the slot several months earlier, was scheduled to chime the closing bell to celebrate its 15th year of being listed on the exchange, said Rosemary Fellner, the bank’s marketing director.

But as the bankers made their way east, they got the news: a technology glitch forced Nasdaq to ground trading what turned out to be one of the longest halts in recent memory, for three hours.

“That really added drama to it because we were not really sure what was going to happen,” Fellner said.

Nasdaq officials told the bankers to come on up anyway. “We’re still hoping you’re on your way,” Fellner said one official told them.

Trading still hadn’t restarted when the bank officials arrived in Times Square just after 3 p.m. But it resumed around 3:25 p.m., and the 4 p.m. close went off as scheduled.

“We would not have known that they were having an issue. They just laid out the red carpet for us,” Unity CEO James Hughes said. Among other things, the exchange broadcast the bank’s logo and ceremony to the passing throngs in Times Square below.

“We got some good brand recognition,” Hughes said. “I was told it was the most widely watched closing of the Nasdaq.”