Is the bell tolling for the current London Metal Exchange? But now the 135-year-old exchange is attracting attention for a very different reason, after it revealed in September that at least 10 parties had expressed an interest in buying it. The London Stock Exchange; the Singapore Exchange, and UK-based broker ICAP have all been fingered by market speculation as potential bidders, with analysts estimating the LME could be worth £1bn. Non-binding bids are expected in mid-February. Mr Abbott, a Leeds man who worked as journalist covering the goings-on at the LME before jumping in as a participant, won't update on how many are still in the running, but says "it's a decent number, certainly enough to get a healthy bidding environment going." The LME is big business. Management are clearly proud of its history, born out of the advent of the steam engine and the telegraph. The new technology made shipping far more predictable, allowing people to trade "forward" against the deliveries they were expecting. But while the trading floor's ring represents a fascinating physical link with the LME's past, it handles just 5pc of trading on what is now the world's largest industrial metals exchange. The LME last year supported a notional $15.4 trillion (£9.8 trillion) of trades, the vast bulk of which were electronic. For the exchange's members, who are also its owners, the decision on a bid will essentially be jam today or jam tomorrow: to take the money now and risk fee hikes and other unwelcome changes under a new owner, or stick with the status quo. When your shareholders are your users they will not push you to maximise the profits (traditionally low) that you make from fees for handling trades - but a new owner might well do so. As Mr Abbott puts it: "If someone is going to get to the point of coming in with a successful bid, it's going to be based on, first of all, a good valuation. But secondly, the members will be very, very cognisant of the value of the business model and they will want to see, before they hand over control of this exchange, that someone shows at least a lot of empathy for them, for the model. That's an understatement, if anything. A recent move by the managment to raise fees, widely seen as an attempt to make it look more attractive to a buyer, prompted a furious letter of complaint from three board directors representing the exchange's ring-dealing members, accusing the management of a lack of consultation. Mr Abbott suggests a certain inevitability to the row. "If you increase fees, people will grumble, there's no question about it," he says. And people who don't find it to be a particularly bad thing don't write letters and don't get them leaked. Nonetheless, he will hold a meeting with the exchange's members on February 7 to talk them through the reasons behind the decision to raise fees. Among those reasons, he points to the need to be able to cope with rising costs and to keep up with competitors in terms of both technology and global presence. He dismisses speculation that he is keen for a sale because he would get a pay-out under an incentive scheme, "as a cheap shot." "Implicit in the suggestion that we are pushing for it because we will get paid out is that we somehow control it [the decision to sell], but we don't," he says. We don't have any votes. And now for the question that will be vexing the Square Mile historians: will Europe's last open outcry floor finally close its doors? Mr Abbott admits that such a possibility is a "big issue." But then he turns technical on the subject. He suspects that any new owner of the exchange would want to keep the LME's unique structure for dating contracts that the face-to-face element of the ring supports better than an electronic system would. "I can't see why the floor would automatically disappear," he says. We don't run it for fun.