Last Tuesday's World Trade Center tragedy may not have taken the wind of the shares of exchange-traded funds, but it did cause them to tack. One of the lesser reported consequences of the destruction of the Trade Center was the closing of the American Stock Exchange's trading floor due to damage around the building housing it and the lack of services to the building. The Amex is, of course, home to 108 exchange-traded funds and structured products. The majority of these products are Barclays iShares and Merrill Lynch HOLDRs.

Though the Amex has been vacuumed clean and passed physical inspection, traders will not be able to get back in to their floor until there has been a literal path cleared to the door. The building is also without basic service such as phones and electricity, explained the Amex's Larry Larkin.

"Physically the building is fine," he explained. "We are set to open tomorrow, if we had services," he added.

Yet, market makers and traders for the ETFs are not homeless. The New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) has generously made a portion of its own trading floor available to its erstwhile competitor.

Meanwhile, options on the iShares are trading on the Philadelphia Stock Exchange (PHLX). One iShares fund already trades on the NYSE and a second trades on the Chicago Board Options Exchange.

The move itself was no more difficult for Barclays than for other firms, explained a Barclays spokesperson. "We needed to be sure that all of the connections were sufficient to have a market place today," she said, adding that investors themselves should not see any changes as a result of the physical relocation.

"People have been working really, really hard to make this day go as smoothly as possible," she pointed out.

By the close of the day trading in the funds had gone off with nary a hitch. Volume in the largest of the iShares (those based on the major indices) was in high end of the normal range. However, portfolio managers report that some of the sector products -- chiefly those covering the financial, cyclical and real estate sectors -- recorded higher than normal volume. Those sectors (airlines are included in the cyclicals) were the ones that analysts had expected to experience large volume.  

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