New York Stock Exchange members seeking to rent their trading rights outnumber brokers who want them, as profits decline at the world’s biggest stock exchange.

About 60 members, or 4% of the 1,366 total, were awaiting rental offers, according to an early August list kept by the exchange’s membership department. As recently as 2002, the NYSE had a waiting list for memberships, which confer the rights to buy and sell stock on the floor. A member’s stock exchange “seat” rents for about $3,000 a week, down by half from 2002.

“Trading is becoming more of a video game,” said Francis Maglio, 60, a Bridgehampton, N.Y.-based former floor broker whose wife, Theresa, put her seat up for lease two months ago. “Seats are on the shelf. It’s more than I’ve seen in a long time.”

Declining demand for seats is one of the NYSE’s challenges as it approaches the first anniversary of the ouster of Chief Executive Officer and Chairman Richard Grasso over his $140 million retirement payout.

Mr. Grasso, 58, tried to protect floor traders by limiting electronic trades that execute automatically. These trades have tripled since 2001 to 10% of the total at the NYSE, where an average of $47 billion of shares change hands daily.

Floor brokers and specialists who conduct share auctions rent the seats, which are owned mainly by individuals and securities firms. Seat prices fell about 50% in the past five years. The last one sold for $1.25 million this month.

John Thain, the former Goldman Sachs Group Inc. president who took over as NYSE chief executive in January, is attempting to maintain the exchange’s 82% market share in its stocks by allowing investors off the floor to do more business electronically. Concerns about the plan contributed to a decline in seat prices.

Slumping trading volume amid a decline in benchmark stock indexes also undermined demand for seats. This month, an average of 1.3 billion shares changed hands at the NYSE each day, down from 1.6 billion in January. Volatility in the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index is at a six-year low, minimizing profitable trading opportunities.

Profits per trade have declined since 2001, when markets began pricing stocks in pennies rather than sixteenths of a dollar, or 6.25 cents. The NYSE’s seven specialist firms lost a

combined $11 million in the first quarter of 2004, compared with a $195 million profit in the first quarter of 2001.

“Seat and lease prices are determined by a number of factors and reflect the overall condition of the broader equities marketplace,” NYSE spokesman Richard Adamonis said in a statement.

Some floor traders are concerned that Mr. Thain’s plan, to permit investors to trade blocks larger than 1,100 shares electronically, will further erode their business. Mr. Thain, 49, has said his proposal, to please investors who crave certainty and speed, would boost the number of trades that execute automatically.

“People on the floor are frightened,” said William Higgins, 68, a retired floor broker in Pine Beach, N.J., who runs an organization of seat owners who lease trading rights to others.

On August 3, a day after Mr. Thain outlined the plan he filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, a seat sold for $1.25 million, the lowest since December 1998. Another seat sold on August 17 for the same price.

The last 12-month leasing contract went for $155,000, on August 19, a 50% decline from 2002, according to the ex change’s Web site.

Mr. Higgins said traders are reluctant to commit to a $3,000 weekly payment when they don’t know what they’ll earn. While floor brokers’ pay varies, as recently as two years ago they typically earned at least $300,000 a year, Mr. Maglio said.

The list of members trying to rent out their seats is kept at the exchange and is available on request to them. The waiting list changes as leases expire and new ones are signed.

Prices of seats and leases fluctuate based on expectations for trading. In 1969, soon after the Dow Jones Industrial average hit a three-year high, a seat sold for $515,000. In 1976, after one of the century’s worst bear markets and the deregulation of brokerage commissions, a seat sold for $40,000.

“It looked like the end of the world,” said the president of discount broker Seaport Securities Corp., Theodore Weisberg, 64. “Today, seat prices are down because business is down.”

On August 16,the exchange reported that quarterly profit fell by more than half to $5.4 million, mostly because of expenses related to litigation against Mr. Grasso. At Chairman John Reed’s request, New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer sued Mr. Grasso to recover $100 million of Mr. Grasso’s pay. Mr. Grasso, in turn, sued the exchange and Reed, seeking $50 million.

Mr. Higgins has proposed that the exchange buy back as many as 366 of its seats for $1 million each to limit declines in prices. He said he collected 224 valid proxies from NYSE members to force a meeting aimed at altering the NYSE constitution. Mr. Higgins said he expects NYSE directors to take it up when they meet on October 7.

“We’ve received the petition and we’re following the proper procedures with respect to it,” said an NYSE spokesman, Ray Pellecchia.

On the exchange floor, firms are making do with less. After Mr. Maglio sold his brokerage to Bank of New York Co. in May 2002, the bank leased two seats he and his wife held. In May, after firing brokers, the bank told the Maglios it wouldn’t renew the leases.

“We have become more efficient as the markets have evolved with electronic trading,” said a Bank of New York spokesman, Jeep Bryant.

Mr. Maglio sold one of his seats in May for $1.1 million more than he paid for it two decades earlier. Now, he’s considering selling the other. “I didn’t want to have an asset that would be idle,” he said.