NEW YORK-Wall Street is back in busi­ness. The New York Stock Ex­change opened trad­ing with­out prob­lem yes­ter­day af­ter a his­toric two-day shut­down caused by su­per­storm Sandy. New York City May­or Michael Bloomberg rang the open­ing bell, then gave a hope­ful thumbs-up. Peo­ple on the trad­ing floor be­low cheered.

"It's good for the city, good for coun­try, it's good for every­one to get back to work," the may­or told CN­BC mo­ments lat­er. The stakes were high for trad­ing to re­sume. Wall Street traders and strate­gists were wor­ried that a third day of de­lay would have meant more pent-up de­mand from cus­tomers to buy and sell stocks, re­sult­ing in a surge of or­ders that could send the mar­ket on wild ride.

Trad­ing was placid from the start yes­ter­day. The Dow Jones in­dus­tri­al av­er­age gave up an ear­ly gain and wound up clos­ing down just 10.75 points, at 13,096.46. The Stan­dard & Poor's 500 in­dex edged down 0.22 point at 1,412.16 and the Nas­daq com­pos­ite lost 10.72 points to 2,977.23

"I've lived through a lot of events-crash­es, mi­ni-crash­es, events of moth­er na­ture, man-made events, ter­ri­ble events like 9/11," said Ted Weis­berg, pres­i­dent of Sea­port Se­cu­ri­ties, 72, short­ly af­ter the open­ing bell. "Some­how or oth­er, the mar­kets con­tin­ue."

AP