"The competitive environment is such that we believe it makes sense for us to be a publicly traded company," a spokesman for the NYSE said on Friday. The spokesman said there has been no serious opposition from the membership to an initial public offering. He said the NYSE board will vote on whether to go public at a September 2 board meeting following recommendations from its Financial adviser Merrill Lynch & Co. Inc. One NYSE source said that Big Board Chairman Richard Grasso had held a meeting on Wednesday with floor members.

One obstacle, however, could be the Internal Revenue Service. The exchange said that it was requesting aruling on whether members who swapped their seats for shares would be subject to a capital gains tax. If that were the case, the NYSE might scrap the idea, the spokesman said. Currently, all US Stock markets are privately held, although the National Association of Securities Dealers, parent of the Nasdaq and the American stock exchanges, has previously said it is taking steps toward a possible IPO.

However, the Stockholm Stock Exchange is owned by publicly traded Sweden's OM Group Inc and the Australia Stock Exchange trades on its own bourse."It is a reflection of the dramatic changes that are taking place in today's Financial markets," said James Angel, associate professor of finance at the Robert Emmet McDonough School of Business at Georgetown University. "A lot of competition is going into their space. By being a for-profit as opposed to a membership organisation, they are going to be able to respond more quickly to changes in the environment," he said.

As the Dow Jones industrial average has climbedmore than 7,000 points since 1994, the NYSE has seen its star rise too.