• Nov
  • 03
  • 2008
  • 11:52 AM

Scenes From a Trading Floor

By: Ray Pellecchia
File Under: NYSE

For those of you who ask me what the NYSE Trading Floor has been like lately, here are two slice-of-life articles that I would recommend:

This Land: Financial Foot Soldiers, Feeling the World’s Weight (NYTimes.com) Excerpt:

Not long ago, a floor broker named Danny Trimble cocked a finger to his head and placed it against his temple, for reasons unrelated to the market; soon an image of Mr. Trimble “shooting” himself made the newspapers. No matter that he is not a hedge fund manager, bank C.E.O. or fat cat; no matter that he is just a financial foot soldier from Jersey, hoarse from shouting at his son’s Pop Warner football games.

Mr. Trimble, 41, works at the edge of the exchange’s main floor, shoulder to shoulder with six other men in a booth the size of an elevator car. Not everyone graduated from college, but all are resident scholars of the hurly-burly floor, educated in reading markets, hunting for matches and executing buy-and-sell orders. They are worth their commissions, they say, because they provide things a computer cannot, things like experience, intuition — a “feel.”

IMPACT: Hopes, fears collide in another day - hardly ordinary - on NYSE's trading floor (Associated Press, via StarTribune.com) Excerpt:

There was only one certainty. This would not be an ordinary day on the floor. There are no ordinary days here anymore.

The electronic board showed investors were betting on stocks to open near the previous day's close, a good sign. Now it was up to Frankel and his trading floor compatriots to figure out whether yesterday's brief exhilaration signaled the edge of the oasis a parched Wall Street had been searching for, or just a cruel mirage.

"That's the million-dollar question," Frankel said.

But for now the only answer was the sound of the opening bell.

Comments

i think the cruel mirage as explained in this post is now over as the elections are taking place today and Wall Street should see the edge of an Oasis as the political reasons for the recession are now over with today's elections.

by Stock Disposal on November 4, 2008 6:03 AM

Good stuff Ray, thanks.

-DT

by Dinosaur Trader on November 4, 2008 9:18 AM

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