Clock That Once Overlooked LSE Floor Moves to Texas in Time for Christmas
A clock that hung over the trading floor at the London Stock Exchange for a quarter of a century is heading to Texas after an unidentified woman outbid Chi-X Europe Ltd., the bourse’s biggest rival, for the relic.
Eight clocks bearing the names of cities from San Francisco to Johannesburg were sold for a total of 41,800 pounds ($66,064) at an auction last night at the No. 1 Lombard Street restaurant, a former banking hall in the City, as London’s financial district is called.
The London clock attracted the highest price, selling for 9,400 pounds to a Texan woman after Chi-X, Europe’s largest alternative trading system, also vied for the timepiece. The buyer, who bid over the phone, also won the San Francisco, New York and Tokyo clocks, paying a total of 27,400 pounds. The four clocks are intended as a Christmas present for her husband, who runs a commodities trading firm, according to the auction venue.
London-based Chi-X Europe, which also accounted for about 14 percent of trading in the benchmark Swiss Market Index this year, paid 3,500 pounds for the Zurich clock. Belinda Keheyan, head of marketing at Chi-X Europe, said the company has already sold on the timepiece.
The clocks overlooked the LSE’s now defunct trading floor on Threadneedle Street from 1971 to the middle of the 1990’s. The electric timepieces, made by Italian clockmaker Solari & C, were found in a market in London’s East End by designer Mark Lawson Bell.
“They were extremely boring clocks, I prefer the ones on my iPad apps,” said Gavin Oldham, who started on the floor of the stock exchange in 1976 and now owns the Share Centre, a retail brokerage with more than 160,000 customers. “I hope they work because they certainly weren’t much to look at.”
A ninth clock, bearing the name of Hong Kong, was unsold.
To contact the reporter on this story: Nandini Sukumar in London at nsukumar@bloomberg.net
To contact the editor responsible for this story: David Merritt at dmerritt1@bloomberg.net.
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