Being a member of an exchange entitles one to spend all of one's daily hours engaged in a form of financial combat.
The trading floor of an exchange is an environment wherein a higher concentration of people are subjected to more incomplete information bits flying around than anywhere else.
I've seen the future. It uses hand signals, at least for now.
There are no friends in the pit. And you can quote me. You do not take prisoners in here.
They knocked me down, knocked off my glasses and stepped all over me.
When older traders look across that floor, they see the bodies of ghosts stacked six feet deep.
He got hit sideways in the pit, his head jerked and he's out with a fractured vertebra. His doctor said he can't come back to the trade floor.
You get some guy standing next to you with gum in his mouth screaming, "Buy seven at 70," and he spits all over you. The first thing I do when I get off the floor is go the bathroom and wash my hands, my face, my neck. I don't want to go home and kiss my kids until I've washed up.
There was absolute physical mayhem. It looked like a kind of tribal ritual, almost a traditional circle dance.
One day a guy lost it on the floor and started screaming about Jesus and the money changers. They had to take him away.
One person came into the business with the highest of intentions. He had a sincere Christian faith. We worked side by side and soon became friends. He thought Jesus Christ would speak to him through the Holy Spirit about his investments. I tried to explain to my new friend that the Spirit of God truly could guide all genuine believers, but that God had given us a brain and expected us to employ that as well. My friend, however, found it to be much less of a mental strain to move around the floor of the exchange, somehow maneuvered by the Holy Spirit, while he meditated for some inner vibration as to which pit he might enter and establish a position in the market ...His stay in the industry was so short-lived I hardly got to know him. And somebody else had to cover the Holy Spirit's debit.
After I'd gotten my seat on the exchange, one of the guys I'd just finessed came up out of the pit and congratulated me. It's that sort of crazy business. ‘You've got a great future in options,' he predicted. ‘You can scream loud, jump high, think fast and count without using your fingers.'
The men on the trading floor may not have been to school, but they have Ph.D.'s in man's ignorance. In any market, as in any poker game, there is a fool ... Knowing about markets is knowing about other people's weaknesses.
Look inside the briefcase of any trader and you will discover between folds of The Wall Street Journal a veritable pharmacy - rolls of Tums, foil packs of Alka-Seltzer Plus, vials of Excedrin, Afrin Nasal Spray, Murine eye and ear drops, Sudafed decongestant, chewable vitamin C, Sinutabs, some Hall's menthol eucalyptic lozenges, and the ubiquitous Chloroseptic. Prescribed AMEX ‘floor doses' call for quadrupling the quantity and dividing by eight the length of between dose intervals.
My throat was as raw as a slab of sushi and didn't taste half as good. My vocal chords were strained. I was going on my third case of strep throat that year and rued the days I hadn't invested in P&G - makers of Chloraseptic or for that matter, Beechnut Lifesavers.
It's like a rugby scrum.
I've never been in a scrum quite like it.
Think of the trading floor as some sort of gigantic auto showroom in which three hundred or so competing dealers are trying to close out their models from last year, along with last year's trade-ins (kept discretely out of sight), while still keeping enough inventory on hand in case some cash-carrying customers walk through the door ready to make a fast on-the-spot deal.
In the pit as an options trader juggling millions of dollars in nanoseconds, I would often double as ringmaster over an unruly mob of bawling, often brawling, human animals, sweating, gum-cracking, foul-mouthed men (and three women) in their twenties and thirties - capable of leaping over the barrier dividing us, ready to kill. I was expected to think and act and anticipate all at once, employing all my wiles, all my senses, including or especially my sixth. If I so much as hesitated, showing an iota of indecision, I'd risk being financially obliterated.
I'd come in buck naked if I could. As it is, the more obnoxious the jacket, the better. The louder it is, the more I can rest my voice and let my jacket draw the attention.
People ask me, "What should I study to become a trader? Economics? Business administration? Accounting?" Then I try not to laugh. Maybe they should study religion, because on any given day there are at least 50 people on an exchange saying, "Oh God, just let this market come back, and I'll never do it again."
Often Jadwin had noted the scene, and unimaginative though he was, had long since conceived the notion of some great, some resistless force within the Board of Trade Building that held the tide of the streets within its grip, alternately drawing it in and throwing it forth. Within there, a great whirlpool, a pit of roaring water spun and thundered, sucking in the life tides of the city, sucking them in as into the mouth of some tremendous cloaca, the maw of some colossal sewer; the vomiting them forth again, spewing them up and out, only to catch them in the return eddy and suck them in afresh.
This crowd of young money movers is not above shooting spitballs or snapping rubber bands. But make no mistake: The frat house pranks are matched by unbridled entrepreneurism.
It is said that in one of the pits one morning a trader died of a heart-attack in the crush but his body was wedged in so tightly it could not fall to the floor. Some time passed before the dealers around him noticed his demise but when they did, they took immediate action. They began feverishly filling in dealing tickets which gave them handsome profits from imaginary trades between themselves and the dead trader.
If the financial markets are a war zone, this is the theater of hand-to-hand combat.
The floor is a swirl of red, green, and yellow jackets that on closer inspection reveal themselves to be little more than polyester sacks slipped on for the purpose of identifying the person yelling in your face.
The Predictors
Thomas A. Bass
1999, p. 10
Big men in steel-toed shoes, who will lose their voices and retreat to the back office before they are forty, are jammed together so closely that they can tell what their neighbors ate for breakfast. They pull their jackets over their heads when someone farts. They goose one another after a good trade. They hurl catcalls at women being trained as runners. This is a hard-drinking, high-cholesterol world, barely graduated from toga parties, who today are flushing Eurodollars down the drain and betting hard against the United States Treasury. The joke in Chicago is that these people, if they weren't running the world financial markets, would be driving taxis.
The Predictors
Thomas A. Bass
1999, p. 5
Last updated: January 9, 2011