Changing of guard at Phila. exchange

The $652 million sale of the Philadelphia Stock Exchange to the Nasdaq OMX Group is expected to be completed today, marking the end of the 218-year-old exchange's run as an independent operation.

But unlike its former rivals - regional exchanges that were swept under a consolidation wave and disappeared - the Philadelphia exchange will continue operating.

"This is not Nasdaq buying the Philadelphia Stock Exchange and leaving Philadelphia," Christopher R. Concannon, executive vice president at Nasdaq OMX, said yesterday. "This is Nasdaq buying the Philadelphia Stock Exchange and coming to Philadelphia."

Concannon was part of a Securities and Exchange Commission team that investigated the Philadelphia Stock Exchange in the late 1990s, when things were wild and woolly at the trading operation.

"It was challenged many years ago. There was concern at the SEC about whether it would make it or not," Concannon said.

It now has the third-largest options-trading business in the United States. "It's a business worth having. It's a business worth growing," Concannon said.

The exchange employs about 400. Jobs will be cut, but Nasdaq has not yet pinned down the numbers.

Constantine Papadakis, the Drexel University president and a member of the exchange's board of governors since 1997, said at the final board meeting in May that the sale was "greater than anything I could have imagined."

"It's bittersweet," said Sandy Frucher, the exchange's chief executive, who was brought in to sell the exchange in 1998 but ended up running it for a decade.