At the time of this writing, the New York Stock Exchange’s trading floor has been empty and closed for a week, and the exchange—which has long resisted moving completely away from open-outcry trading, despite dwindling numbers of floor traders—has been conducting trading on a fully-electronic basis.

The “temporary” move—implemented to protect floor specialists and brokers from the spread of the Covid-19 disease—sees NYSE finally fall in line with rival stock exchanges that have either discarded floor trading years ago, or have operated fully electronic since inception, and with other exchanges that have also closed remaining floor operations in response to the disease. The Chicago Board Options Exchange, for example, preemptively closed its trading floor on Friday, March 13.

This isn’t the first time NYSE has closed its floor in response to an emergency, though it is the first time in history that not a single physical exchange trading floor worldwide has been open for business. So while for most exchanges, operating in the age of the coronavirus has meant business as usual, it has represented a major shift for NYSE, which officials say was made possible by the new NYSE Pillar platform that the exchange rolled out last year.

Not only has the new platform provided sufficient capacity to support a more than three-fold increase in orders per day to more than a billion orders per day during the recent unprecedented volatility, it has been vital in being able to move to an all-electronic model with minimal disruption.

“We, as a practical matter, are always ready, any day, for a potential disaster. So we regularly test on weekends, both with the exchange alone, as well as with the industry broadly, for disaster recovery scenarios that range from our 11 Wall Street building being unavailable, or our New Jersey datacenter being unavailable, or some combination of doomsday scenarios. So in terms of readiness, as we moved to our NYSE Pillar technology platform, we had as a requirement from day one that we would be able to manage any sort of disruption to the 11 Wall Street facility,” said Michael Blaugrund, NYSE Group COO, in the days between deciding to close the trading floor and reopening as an electronic-only exchange.

“Even though the human beings are not going to be on the floor, the designated market makers (DMMs) who have accountability to each of our issuers, and who have a regulatory obligation to provide continuous displayed bids and offers to the market—as well as additional liquidity throughout the book to ensure volatility is dampened—continue to have that same responsibility in that electronic fashion,” Blaugrund said.

However, losing the floor broker community—which accounts for around one-third of activity during the exchange’s closing auctions—is not completely without disruption. For example, a pure electronic environment does not support the use of D-orders, which gave floor brokers the discretion to operate at a more aggressive price during the closing auction period.

“It has become a growing proportion of the closing auction, and a tool that more people are using. So ensuring that the street is ready to operate without that in their toolkit is something that our team has been working on … with urgency over the last several weeks in case this type of transition had to come to pass,” Blaugrund said.

Without access to D Orders, floor brokers can use alternative order types, such as Market On Open, Market On Close, Limit On Open, Limit On Close, and Closing Imbalance Offset orders. Use of Market On Close and Limit On Close orders has grown by about 25% and 12%, respectively, compared to pre-Covid closing auctions. However, while officials say execution quality is “performing as expected” during the floor closure, NYSE data shows that auction price dislocation—a measure of execution quality during opening and closing auctions—has increased compared to floor-based auctions.

Of course, the continued participation of the DMMs, even only electronically, depends on the individual brokers employed by those firms being healthy enough to make markets electronically—or on them having sufficiently responsive trading algorithms already set up to take over in the event of the pandemic decimating its active workforce, or their firm’s preventative measures rendering a proportion of that workforce unavailable.

Furthermore, though NYSE has deemed the floor closure a temporary measure—indeed, NYSE CEO Stacey Cunningham says the exchange “will 100% reopen the floor… as soon as it is safe to do so,”—there’s no definition of how “temporary” it will be. The floor could be closed for several months, at least. And if exclusively-electronic trading becomes the “new normal” in the meantime, and NYSE’s model falls into line with those of other exchanges around the world, it begs the question: Why would NYSE ever reopen the floor?

Between that possibility and the potential “rise of the machines,” specialists or floor brokers may want to consider a career change. Maybe it’s time to write that novel, kick off that startup idea, impart your knowledge to others via online trader education courses, or—once travel restrictions are lifted—take that trip you’ve always talked about. Because the old ways may not have a role in the “new normal.”