The Arizona Stock Exchange (AZX) was an electronically enabled stock exchange for extended-hours trading. It was founded in 1990 as Wunsch Auction Systems as Wunsch Auction Systems The computers were based in Minneapolis, Minnesota, with the headquarters in New York City. The company was fought by the New York Stock Exchange. As of December 25, 1991, the exchange allowed about 3,100 stocks to be traded during a day, and the system had 56 customers that were institutions. It also had smaller activity than it needed, with Wunsch saying it needed about 24 customers a day placing orders to attract steady business, while it regularly had no more than a dozen customers per day place orders. It was not the first electronic exchange, but it was the first one set up to directly compete with traditional stock exchanges via price "discovery" in a bidding process. Trading commenced on March 30, 1992.
1993-2001: Auctions and closure
In April 2001, the SEC granted the Arizona Stock Exchange permission to hold one of its 30-minute live auctions when the markets opened. The exchange auctioned online stocks as though they were antiques or art. Previously, the exchange had only been able to operate on off-hours for a number of reasons, and hadn't been "introduced in a full-form way." Support for the new time slot for the auction came from companies such as Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan, Credit Suisse, First Boston and Instinet. The auction's founder and president was Steven Wunsch.
While the idea behind AZX was ahead of its time in the 1990s and anticipated the more successful electronic communication networks such as Archipelago, it closed in October 2001 primarily due to lack of volume.
Business model
Restricted to use by large institutional users only,