People are not those setting the breakneck tempo on Wall Road.
The New York Inventory Alternate is now processing 1.2 trillion order messages per day, a staggering threefold leap from simply 4 years in the past, in accordance with New York Inventory Alternate president Lynn Martin. The surge, she mentioned, is being pushed by AI-fueled buying and selling, algorithmic methods, and hyper-speed market members which have remodeled the construction of U.S. markets.
“When I first took this job four years ago, COVID was still rearing its ugly head, and a volatile day in our market saw about 350 billion incoming order messages a day,” Martin mentioned throughout an interview on the Fortune Most Highly effective Girls Summit. “This past April, a peak day for us was 1.2 trillion messages.”
Every message on the inventory change represents a purchase order, promote order, or match, that means that shares are altering fingers quicker than ever.
‘We can’t surveil that with people’
Martin mentioned the NYSE now depends on synthetic intelligence to watch buying and selling flows in actual time, as a result of people alone are not able to maintaining with the speed of exercise.
“It’s our obligation to protect the financial markets, so we have to surveil those messages,” Martin mentioned. “We can’t do that with a bunch of humans. We need good technology. So we use AI in our regulatory function all over, looking for nefarious behavior in the market.”
This is likely one of the first instances the NYSE has overtly acknowledged simply how deeply AI has change into embedded in U.S. monetary markets in only a few years. AI now acts as a sort of market cop, scanning trillions of micro-movements to detect manipulation, spoofing, and cyberattacks. And in a world the place each day messages now prime a trillion, that hypervigilant regulation turns into essential.
Why NYSE runs a non-public, offline information heart
Velocity isn’t the one strain shaping Wall Road. Cybersecurity considerations have risen sharply alongside message quantity, and Martin mentioned the NYSE operates in another way from most exchanges and buying and selling platforms in a single important means: It has its personal information heart.
“We’re a little unique in that we have our own purpose-built data center. We have matching engines in that data center, and we run our own proprietary network,” she mentioned.
She added that this information heart has no web. All the pieces contained in the NYSE’s core buying and selling setting operates on point-to-point hyperlinks, remoted from the general public web solely.
“We take cyber super seriously,” she mentioned. “On our most critical infrastructure, we have full visibility of the system, and therefore we can protect that infrastructure.”
Roaring IPO market
Removed from scaring off firms, Martin mentioned the surge in market exercise and the NYSE’s heavy funding in know-how are literally pulling extra firms towards the general public markets—not pushing them away. After two years of IPO drought, listings have come roaring again in 2025, and CEOs are “calling nonstop” to safe a debut window on the change.
“The IPO market is really, really strong,” she mentioned. “We’ve had a great year so far across all sectors.”
She added that CEOs are actively pushing to go public once more after a protracted freeze: “The amount of CEOs calling me saying, ‘When’s the government going to open up again?’—our phones are ringing a lot.”
A lot of that demand, she added, comes from CEOs and buyers who wish to be in markets which might be liquid, resilient, and controlled, regardless of how briskly they transfer. The rise of AI, the trillion-message buying and selling surge, and cyber dangers aren’t causes to step again from the general public market. Fairly the opposite.
“Large deals are getting done,” she mentioned.
