Trading floors send hopeful signs on disruption

Hong Kong

TRADITION can buy some livelihoods time in their battle with technology. That is one lesson from the surprisingly slow death of the trading floor.

Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing, which runs the city's bourse, says it will close its trading hall when the lease expires in October.

That is hardly the biggest shock to emerge from Asia's financial markets recently: floor-based dealing made up just 0.2 per cent of overall trades in late 2014, when it stopped publishing the data, down from 25.8 per ce…