MEXICO CITY (Reuters) -- After being filled for more than a century with
                  voices, the floor of Mexico's stock exchange fell quiet on Monday, the
                  shouting of traders replaced with the silent tapping of electronic buy and sell
                  orders.

                  Starting Monday, all transactions on the bourse are to take place through an
                  electronic trading system called Sentra. During the previous 104 years,
                  trading here was done much as it still is to a large part on Wall Street, with
                  traders frantically yelling orders.

                  With Mexican musicians strumming melancholy goodbye songs on the stock
                  exchange floor on Friday, the 150 or so traders nostalgically called out their
                  last orders before taking photographs for each other and shaking hands.

                  "A few minutes ago we carried out the last live trade on this floor of the
                  Mexican Stock Exchange," Manuel Robleda, president of the exchange, told
                  reporters.

                  "This concludes a long and fruitful period that now leads us to a new road,
                  where all transactions on the exchange will be automatic," he added.

                  The traders were less enthusiastic, and the market itself seemed to agree,
                  falling Friday for the fifth session of the new year.

                  "We are all sad .... We kept a minute of silence, gave each other autographs
                  and took photos," one trader said.

                  Like many other developments of the modern world, the move is being done
                  in the name of cost efficiency and in a bid to reduce human error, exchange
                  officials said.

                  "We can also increase the amount of information we offer our clients about
                  who is buying, selling and at what price," said Alvaro Garcia Pimentel, head
                  of a traders' association.

                  But it may also cost some traders' their jobs.

                  "We estimate a third of the traders are already gone, and more than half will
                  probably be unemployed," another trader said.

                  However the deputy chief of the Mexican Stock Exchange, Gerardo Flores,
                  told Reuters in November that the majority of the traders would likely be
                  redeployed within their brokerages, many dealing on the Sentral electronic
                  system.

                  The Mexico City stock market, the second largest in Latin America after
                  Brazil in terms of turnover, has a daily volume of between $150 million and
                  $200 million.

                  It has approximately 300 stocks listed and its capitalization is about $90
                  billion.

                   Copyright 1999 Reuters.