In all seriousness, this was usually the result of needing to make good use of time while being on hold. These traders did not have time to sit and wait while they were on hold. Of course, much chaos resulted.
One of my many tech support jobs involved a call where I was supporting a trading floor guy on the NYSE in the late 90s. Only happened once, but it stuck in my mind. It was some of the most stress I've been under in my life-- but the guy knew what he was talking about and exactly what to say to keep things moving. He put me on hold several times during a relatively short call.
I could see that being like when people are in the background on a computer during a news segment and they are jokingly typing like a hacker in a movie.
The buildings he's seen inside and in front of literally don't exist any more. The interior shots were in the COMEX (commodities exchange) trading hall in the original 4 World Trade Center. This is also the black building seen behind him in the exterior shot.
It was completely squashed on 9/11 by the collapse of the tower (2 WTC) also seen behind him
people fail to realize just how connected this kind of stock trading is/was to 9/11. and this place was chosen as a target because it represented the global economy.
What were they all actually doing during this? Were they all trying to buy and sell verbally? Who were they yelling at? How could anyone get anything done with all that yelling and chaos? It always seemed like the most horribly inefficient way to buy and sell IMO.
Nah it's Adderall now, cocaine was more pre-2000s. Obviously it's still there, but from what I've heard most of Wall Street has turned into boring nerds who abuse Adderall and sit at computers all day. It lacks the cool factor of chainsmoking and doing rails nowadays
I'd imagine that's how it is in the big leagues. Plenty of low level sales folk still railing lines and seriously quoting Glengarry Glen Ross. I once had a coked out company owner do the entire watch monologue in all seriousness as though he expected nobody to have seen it. By the time he was done the line had worn off and he apologized. He went into his office and came out ten minutes later waving around a gun.
Fucking wild times. I never did drugs at work myself. Just after to deal with having been at work.
It looks so fake every time I see something like this. How do they even communicate? Its hundreds of people shouting at each other, no way they could hear each other or actually get deals done.
I personally know this guy in the video. He’s still a broker filling orders in the SPX pit (S&P 500 Index Options trading pit). I started my career in this trading pit. It still exists and plenty more like it exist. This is where the big customers come to trade because the size of orders that trade in the pit would not get reasonable execution prices on screens. That’s the main reason these trading pits have not gone away and likely won’t for a long time.
Interesting and wow. That’s very cool to hear and informative. Why is considered a big customer? How has online trading impacted the business? What about day trading? Are you still in the field?
I’ll start in reverse order. Yes, I’m still in the business!
Online trading/electronic trading has helped to make markets really efficient. The computerization of trading has made it easier for seasoned traders and your average Joe to agree on price a lot more than it used to be. This means when you go to trade, you’re getting a much more fair price than you would have back in the day before all these developments.
Big customers have large orders, with lots of assets backing those customers to account for the risk they are taking. These customers are usually hedge funds, pension funds, family offices managing a bunch of normal investor money, 401(k) companies like fidelity managing peoples retirement accounts, endowment funds for schools funded by donations, insurance companies hedging their annuity exposure, large banks, and large companies in general. The reason they may trade can differ. Some have specific strategies that they have to stick to, where they have to make the same trade once a month (they outline these details in their fund prospectus). Some are speculating on the market (their analysis shows that the market should continue going up, so they want upside exposure). Some are hedging their risk (they have a lot of long equities and want to protect the risk that the market goes down, so they don’t lose as much or any money when that happens). In all of these cases, these orders would be too large for screens to absorb and get a fair price (with how competitive screen trading is, the prices would get distorted when orders with enough magnitude trade on screens, as competitors would trade small portions of the order, then after finding out how big the order is, would “fade” the market and the price would dislocate quite dramatically from “fair value” until the customer gets filled at absurd prices). In a trading pit, the broker, who has the order from his customer, has to find what the fair price of filling the order would be and then the community would each take a piece of the order at the agreed upon price. This negotiation happens in real time, face to face, between the broker and local traders in the pit. It often saves the customer hundreds and thousands (if not hundreds of thousands, and in rare cases millions) of dollars on the final price that they get on the difference between “fair value” and the price that they trade. The pit then is beneficial for customers and local traders in that everyone gets to make money and the goal of the broker is to make sure everyone gets fair enough price for the risk they take.
What an interesting business that I never really understood. It was not important to me years ago. Too busy with day to day life.
Now? We do some day trading (is that what it’s called when you do it online and check every day?) with some fun money to see what happens. If we find a company that has stock priced in our budget, then I will do some research on the company and see what the projections are. I look at debts and future contacts and some other information. It’s a very risky business, but it is also very lucrative if karma is smiling on you.
If you want to understand it, go see Trading Places with Eddie Murphy and Dan Aykroyd. Also worth catching Jamie Lee Curtis, for a couple of reasons. But the scene on the commodities trading floor is pretty explanatory.
OK. First off, I traded hard red winter wheat futures at the Kansas City Board of Trade. As a local. Which means I traded for my own account. I mostly did what's called scalping the market. That means I usually didn't put on long term trades. Mostly just a few minutes for each trade, trying to capture small price fluctuations on small positions, but do it over and over. I'm not sure what they're trading in this pit but overall it doesn't matter.
In the pit there are locals like me and there were people who filled orders for the big firms. Not all locals are scalpers, there are some who were speculators, they would carry large positions on their books.
All this yelling is called open outcry. It's very old and very simple, a meeting of buyers and sellers. How you tell what another trader wants is advertised by how they announce their intentions. To buy you always say the price before the quantity.
"I'M TWO BID FOR TWENTY!"
If the price of a bushel was 3.42, then he just announced he'd pay that much for 20 contracts. Each contract is worth 5,000 bushels. He just offered to the world he'd buy 100,000 bushels of wheat for 3.42 each.
On the flipside:
"I'LL SELL TWENTY AT TWO!" or just twenty at two. Or the contract month at two, even shorter: " TWENTY MAY TWO!" (There's multiple months of the same commodity being traded in the pit simultaneously, so that's how you have to make sure you're trading the same contract month if the cents are close to the same. In wheat, the months traded are March, May, July, September and December. The words September and December are normally shortened to Sep and Dec. Pronounced Deece. All done to add brevity to the outcry.
The other way to know what the other trader is doing is seeing their hands. Palms out: sell palms in: buy. Eye contact is huge with the other trader and you always make sure not to long after the trade is executed to check with the other side to make sure you're both on the same page. That too is done quickly. "OK, I bought 20 at 2 and I bought another 20 at 1 and a half?" Those trades are written on cards that get turned into a person every half hour where a computer matches them. The cards are two sided. You write buys on the blue side, sells on the red side. They had your trading initials printed on the bottom. When recording a trade on the card you filled out boxes from left to right: Quantity, Trading initials of other trader, Month, Price, Clearing firm.
There's a pulpit beside the pit with at least one, usually two pit reporters tasked with specific months to track. They wore a headset that was connected to people in a booth above the trading floor that entered the trades into computers that flashed the prices across the world, and onto the board above the pits for us to see the current price. We would report our trades at them with yells also. Deece trades two! July is six sellers! May is five bid! (There's would be just a number for the last sale price. An a next to it if the new offer was below the last sale, a little b next to it if the newest bid was above the last sale price)
Before all that everything was done on huge chalkboards.
Now how money is made, I'm surprised no one asked that. The price of grain futures moves at a quarter of a cent per tick. It's a $12.50 price difference per contract per tick. So, if I buy 1 contract of May wheat right this second at $3.42 (that's the price per bushel) and an order comes in to pay up to $3.42&1/4 and I sell him 1, I just made $12.50 in my trading account. Normally I traded 5 and 10 lots (lots=quantity). So, a quarter cent on 5 was $62.50. A half cent movement would make me, or lose me $125. It grows as you have larger positions. Like I said, I scalped the market so I would just try and do that over and over all day. Which was 3 hours 45 minutes long. Opening bell was at 9:30, we closed at 1:15. That's throwback to when orders came in from farmers via the mail. The pits were very slow then but the rules never changed.
Two is the smallest part of the price at that time, but the price even breaks down into quarter cents also. So even, quarter, half and three quarters were traded. The price usually only moves at a quarter cent at a time so there's no need to include the dollar amount or even the dime, it's presumed. So even though I was using two as an example, more often we were yelling quarter, half or three quarters. In the case of three quarters, that's kind of a clumsy bit to spit out and was said as d'gotters.
It's mostly computers buying and selling now from what I understand. So trading floors are now very quiet.
But if you want a view in the old world I would recommend Micheal Lewis's "Liars Poker".
It's an excellent autobiographical account of his time as a Solomon Brothers trainee in the mid 80s. It's absolutely bonkers, money really was king. HR I don't think existed.
The best part was that page about how everyone was excited about these new mortgage-backed securities -- everyone, that is, except for the old-timers who remembered the Great Depression.
Yeah the invention of the tools that would in time sink the economy in 2008 was an amazing part of the book.
But my favorite bit was the description of the mortgage traders getting extra long receiver cords for their phones so that they could launch the receivers at people. I mean full insanity.... absolutely unhinged behavior.
I can't recommend The Trading Game: A Confession by Gary Stevenson enough. Kind of an autobiography of a FOREX trader and goes pretty deep into what their life is like.
Bear Stearns collapsed in March 2008 due to massive losses from toxic subprime mortgage-backed securities and a subsequent bank/liquidity run, which served as an early catalyst for the 2008 financial crisis. Kappa Beta Phi (KBP) is a secret, exclusive Wall Street "fraternity" of high-ranking financial executives (including former Bear Stearns leaders like Jimmy Cayne and Alan Schwartz) known for annual black-tie dinners where members perform satirical roasts and musical parodies.
Here they are with Epstein at mit investor David koch party in the hamptons months after Epstein did his first jail sentence.
Also recommend Liars Poker by Michael Lewis, for a look at 90's wall street, and The Buy Side by Turney Duff - maybe more of a story of descent into addiction, but still an eye opener.
Michael Lewis's The big short is also a great book, about the 2008 crash - goes way beyond the film.
Have to say Lewis has become a bit of a dickhead more recently, with his crypto peddling bullshit.
Nobody—and I don't care if you're Warren Buffett or Jimmy Buffett—nobody knows if a stock's going to go up, down, sideways or in circles, least of all stockbrokers. It's a fugazi. It's a fugayzi. It's a whazy. It's a woozie. It's... fairy dust. It doesn't exist. It's never landed. It's no matter. It's not on the elemental chart. It's not real.
I worked and traded at the Chicago board of trade for 7 years. His assessment is correct. Some of the worst people, now give them all a couple million.... even worse people.
Was a runner at the Merc, and I agree. They were almost all some of the most insane people I've ever met in my life. Like one guy who bragged that when he had to sell one of his two mountainside properties he made sure to build an addition on the property he kept, to screw up the view of the people who bought the other one out of sheer spite.
I worked there and at the KCBOT. Where I met my best friends and my worst enemies. Then stood beside each all day. At least the trading day was short in the grain pits.
Ever since Occupy Wallstreet, the forced division has been pretty obvious. Then look at how close we get to unified anger, Luigi and Epstein are 2 recent good examples, and how quick they are to change the script before we gather the torches and pitchforks.
AI data centers is a big one now. Everyone hates that shit. Will be interesting to see how it plays out. Might be the most unified I've seen the country on a topic
Gas prices are the one thing you can actually count on the American public to respond to. Like legitimately if there was ever a revolt or revolution here, it would be over gas prices.
If Americans ever got organized and managed to get a general strike going for 24 hours they'd see a whole new attitude coming from their government. For the pathologically greedy it would be a fate worse than hell
the problem is so many peoples' everything is tied to their employment status, so many people aren't willing to risk their home, healthcare, medication, etc. that they're already only one paycheck away from losing
We will literally have to win a LOT of small fights before we're even able to organize at the level of a general strike nationally, all while the odds are stacked very high against us
You can actually go on google analytics and see that the division politics had a disturbing uptick at almost the exact moment Occupy gained a ton of momentum
Remember when the word redneck used to refer to striking miners willing to fight and die just to see an eight hour workday
Remember when "pie in the sky" was first invented as a phrase by union organizer Joe Hill in the song Preacher and the Slave to refer to immaterial promises of salvation in the afterlife (preached about by the Salvation Army, aka starvation army) versus the real world material gains possible through socialism and unionization?
Remember when America had farmers willing to threaten communist revolution over the New Deal?
I do, and i wish i didn't because the rest of this country is so fantastically ignorant they look at that same new deal with half the population thinking that was socialism (bad) and the other half thinking it's socialism (good)
This is education. Sorry to repeat myself. I'm not American..I'm English were taught the difference between socialist projects and just open communism.. you in America have been misinformed on purpose... Because it fucks off the rich... NHS.. socialist..cops.. socialist.. free hospital.. socialist. But it's sold as government Vs what you don't want evil communism lol
So many people have been indoctrinated to automatically associate ANYTHING remotely connected to the idea of socialism as evil due to the red scare. Their brain catches a whiff of socialism and their eyes glaze over.
It's kinda funny though because it's not even a part of that world?! I mean the Russians used the word socialist.. but millionaires use the word charity 🤣
Yeah I know what you mean. People will even call Social Security (not sure if you're familiar but it's our government retirement program) socialism when it was explicitly created to give back what you put in. If if helps people, especially the poor, it's socialism in the minds of many Americans.
I honestly feel a lot of it is tied to racism here - minority groups have higher poverty rates and such for obvious reasons. So if a program helps non-whites, it's a bad program. Even if it also helps white people. If you haven't heard of it, look up Reagan's racist caricature of a "welfare queen."
Our elites really did a great job of linking socialism to racism and xenophobia in America, I'll give them that lol.
No (an emphatic 'No')-- That's the problem in a nutshell. America has wiped clean and forgotten (not taught, Unions obliterated / vilified, etc etc) its history of Labor activism and tradition -- Deliberately and with concerted Effort. Propaganda is not just something the Enemy engages in to control its masses.
Actually, democrats passed the Dodd-Frank act in 2010, which imposed most needed regulations on the banking sector. Guess who managed to repeal it in 2018 ?
if this is an interesting topic check out a documentary named "Into the Pit" great movie about the end of open outcry around 2008
Customers, like myself (well my company as I was far too young for the heyday) would get terrible fills, especially in more illiquid markets like commodity hedging. If we failed to fix 100 lots at $3.90 and the broker got filled at 3.88 and lied to us, he just made an extra $75k right off my back. At the same time it was a great thing as a floor broker could get his foot into finance even if he was a hs drop out or community college grad. If someone who was good in street / quick math and could yell a lot could make a fortune. A lot of outer borough Italian and Irish guys who were blocked from wall street made fortunes, often bigger than their wasp peers, in finance. Many pivoted to digital world many didn't.
It was usually written down right away and then people like me were paid to wait by the trader and then run the orders from the pit to our phone guy who called in the trades. Then we picked up orders from the phone guy and ran them back to the trader in the pits. Lots of paper and tickets. At least how our group worked at the CME in Chicago. God help you if you dropped anything.
My first day as a runner I walked onto the floor and there was thousands of people, all shouting. I froze a few steps in the doorway, and my boss looks back and goes "Most people walk out now. If you're gonna walk, no shame in it." I stuck it out, and honestly? Most fun job I ever had. I met some of the most insane people I've ever known, saw some of the -craziest- stuff, too.
It looks like utter madness, and it was, but somehow they all managed to be crazy in the same direction and kept it working.
There's no email or computers at that time. How do you trade? One person holds a piece of paper in the air and yells the name of the stock on the paper and the price they are looking to buy or sell at. Somebody hears them and is agreeable to the price, stock and amount... shouts back. They write and sign the agreement on the slip. Slip gets processed by the administrators as quickly as possible. That's what all the yelling and waving is about.
Pretty sure there's people at the terminals who are able to carry out the transactions and everyone else is buying and/or selling. They used a lot of hand signals to show what they wanted to buy or sell. That's all I remember from a video I saw like 3 years ago
Booths on perimeter are where the clerks solicit orders from clients. Clerks then communicate the order to the Broker, who attempts to fill the order through other Brokers or Market Makers in the circular middle booths.
My high school business and marketing class visited the WTF and the commodities pits back in 2001 and a dude had a heart attack and had to be carried out on a gurney. As younger me watched, I was like, "Nope, this job aint for me."
Most brokers started their day with a list of specific buy and sell orders, and would revise the list as the market moved. It was not as random as the video makes it look.
At that time the stock prices were on a screen that rolled past. The callers were calling buyers and sellers at the same time as yelling for other salespeople to buy and / or sell. These transactions had to happen in minutes.
Social media apps use the selected music as another data point in algorithmic decisions. Certain songs will become associated with a trend. People help boost the virality of their videos by choosing a song that's trending.
Sometimes it's just a backing track. People are awful at mixing, so sometimes the music drowns out the audio.
Sometimes it's intentionally loud for engagement purposes.
The day social media platforms to use their algorithms for comfort and usability and not exploiting users to stay on the platform for as long as possible is the day i sprout wings and fly to portugal.
This video was made by the band you're hearing. I've found them many times on Youtube Shorts; they upload algorithm-friendly clips like these with their music on top as a way to advertise their music.
Needless to say, basically every post in here is stolen from somewhere else and reuploaded by a bot.
And most of that evaporated soon after as RDJ slid into substance abuse.
May have been "in that crowd" in '92, but was still functional. He went off the deep end a couple years after this and his life went pear-shaped for a few years.
I was going to say that he may have been high af in that building. His observation is still valid and totally on point but there may be an asterisk as well.
You know it’s bad if the guy who grew up in Hollywood and had a major coke problem calls them a bunch of superficial money hungry idiots with an overbearing amount of energy.
Through a substitute company, I once worked at a call center. They were like this.
Absolutely insufferable people to be around. Was supposed to work there for a week. Cancelled the rest of the week after 3 hours of work.
It might look fun in movies like The Wolf OF Wall Street, but in reality, insufferable people. Might be nice people one on one, but the environment that was in that workplace, they all helped create, was the most horrible place I ever worked at.
The NYSE building at Wall & Broad is all for show. I don't think there's any(?) active pit trading there anymore; it's for business TV, events, photo ops.
Today, the exchange itself is a collection of servers in a datacenter in New Jersey. And yep, it's precisely here where firms bid for co-located rack space to deploy trading infrastructure to minimize latency when talking to the exchange.
And now its computer algorithms controlled by a few big hedge funds that manipulate both ends of the market so they always win.
I rather go back to this then what we have now. Sure its bigger and its cheaper for retail but like the middle class, there was more money flowing in the middle then now.
What he said but for whoever added some dumbfuck music over his talking and the video, whether that person did it making the original video or some shithead that found it and added over it
I'm Gen X and when the 80s really kicked in, the corporate money-hungry rat-race seemed like that's the only way you would get rich. It was a weird time. Songs like Billy Joel's "Pressure" fit right in to the neuroticism.
The Crimson Permanent Assurance bits from Monty Python's Meaning of Life (1983) with the ominous skyscrapers and douchebags in suits also fit right in to the Zeitgeist.
Basically what I'm saying is, the money hungry attitude was criticized in the 80s but it was pretty rampant.
There was a time before social media when being called a sellout was one of the worst insults. That's essentially being an influencer, and it's now the #1 career aspiration for Gen Z and Gen Alpha.
I used to live in Chicago and ride the train to the northern suburbs. If you get on the train that leaves around 3-3:30pm, you will find yourself surrounding by Board of Trade traders. Those guys have so much adrenaline still pumping that they are wild. Drinking, playing poker, telling dirty jokes, and being so loud.
I suspect they are somewhat calmer when they reach home but they can be terrifying the first time you are sitting in the same train car.
Now I understand why every video these days has subtitles... Because it's impossible to listen to what someone is saying when there's a fucking SONG with fucking VOCALS being played LOUDER than the actual audio of the clip.
If they're on the trading floor, they're not the high-end money grubbers that he's portraying them as. They're unfortunately the bottom of the pecking order at their agencies. That's why they're working the floor. They have one job, and that is to complete orders and do it for the correct price, or they could end up getting fired.
921
u/BlepMaster500 17h ago
I laughed at how the dude just randomly bumped him while holding two phones like...
"RAAAHHHH, AKIMBO PHONES!!!"