r/interestingasfuck • u/Key_Performer_3645 • 20h ago
Robert Downey Jr, visiting Wall Street back in 1992 and being horrified after only staying there for 5 minutes
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r/interestingasfuck • u/Key_Performer_3645 • 20h ago
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u/Matlachaman 16h ago
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.