How are stocks traded? Suppose a schoolteacher in California wants to take an ocean cruise. To finance the trip, she decides to sell 100 shares of stock she owns in General Motors Corporation. So she calls her broker and directs him to sell the shares at the best price he can get. At the same time, an engineer in Florida decides to use some of his savings to buy 100 GM shares, so he calls his broker and places a "buy" order for 100 shares at the market price. Both brokers wire their orders to the NYSE, where their representatives negotiate the transaction. All this can occur in less than a minute. In the end, the schoolteacher gets her cash and the engineer gets his stock, and both pay their brokers a commission. The transaction, like all others handled on the exchange, is carried out in public, and the results are sent electronically to every brokerage office in the nation. Stock exchange "specialists" play a crucial role in the process, helping to keep an orderly market by deftly matching buy and sell orders. If 57