Wall Street braces for storm; exchanges to stay open

By John McCrank and Richard Leong

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Some Wall Street traders booked hotels, while banks and brokerages prepared to get by with bare bones staffing, but major exchanges said it was business as usual as a potentially historic blizzard bore down on the northeast.

Brokers and dealers snapped up hotel rooms in Manhattan in anticipation of problems on the road and with public transportation due to the storm, which threatens to dump up to 3 feet (90 cm) of snow on the East Coast and disrupt travel for tens of millions of people.

"Most brokers down here have already gotten a room in the city and mostly right downtown near the financial district. I don't suspect it will be an issue at all," said Ken Polcari, director of the NYSE floor division at O'Neil Securities in New York.

Intercontinental Exchange Inc's New York Stock Exchange unit, Nasdaq OMX Group, and BATS Global Markets said the exchanges they operate are currently expected to stay open for normal operating hours Monday and Tuesday.

The last time the stock markets closed due to weather was in October 2012 when Superstorm Sandy bore down on the East Coast, bringing flooding, punishing winds and widespread power outages that led to a two-day closure of U.S. stock markets.

Regulators asked the exchanges to revisit their business continuity plans in the wake of that storm to prevent further closures. NYSE and BATS have backup data centers in Chicago, while Nasdaq has a backup data center in Ashburn, Virginia.

Meanwhile, the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association, which represents U.S. bond dealers and investors, said the domestic fixed income market will stick to its regular trading hours Monday and Tuesday, a SIFMA spokeswoman said.

Other traders are keeping tabs on announcements about possible highway closures and disruption to buses and trains.

"We were told to go to skeletal staff before the afternoon," said Karl Haeling, vice president at Landesbank Baden-Wurttemberg in New York. "Right now it's business as usual."

The New York City-based Depository Trust and Clearing Corp., which ensures that U.S. stock, bond and mutual fund trades are paid and accounted for, said as of Monday morning it and its subsidiaries had no plans to extend or otherwise change deadlines for clearing funds, settlements and other processes.

"We haven't put out any special notice," said Joe Cuniglio, director of settlement and cashiering operations at DTCC. "We have folks in various secondary and tertiary locations, so you're in good hands."

(Reporting by John McCrank, Chuck Mikolajczak and Richard Leong; additional reporting by Jed Horowitz; Editing by Christian Plumb)