The Toronto Stock Exchange

The Toronto Stock Exchange was founded in 1861 by a group of Toronto brokers, growing over the following century into Canada's largest stock exchange, heavily weighted toward the resource, mining and energy companies that reflected the country's natural-resource-driven economy. Its trading floor, with brokers using hand signals and shouted orders to execute trades, was for decades a fixture of Toronto's financial district, physically housed in a series of increasingly larger buildings as trading volumes grew.

An early move to electronic trading

In 1997, the TSX closed its physical trading floor entirely and moved to fully electronic trading, making it one of the first major stock exchanges in the world to abandon open-outcry trading altogether, years ahead of exchanges like the New York Stock Exchange, which kept a physical floor presence for much longer. The exchange later merged with the Montreal Exchange and other Canadian markets under the TMX Group, and today the TSX remains one of the largest exchanges in the world by market capitalization, still headquartered in Toronto's financial district.

Sources

• The Canadian Encyclopedia — Toronto Stock Exchange
• Wikipedia — Toronto Stock Exchange

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