A Ship Out to Sea
The trading floor wasn’t actually a physical ocean-going vessel, but the journeys and experiences were the same. It had its own rough seas and sometimes smooth sailing. When you deviated from your True North, the water certainly got choppy.
Like the ocean, the floor could seem placid at times but was full of distraction and danger. Like the ocean, it was also full of great joy. Amazing things could happen at any moment.
Going up the escalator to the floor was like walking the gangplank into the ship. You put your exchange-issued identification card through a turnstile and walked down a barren gray hallway to smoked and thick glass doors. When you opened them, a rush of noise blew out that was so strong it shuddered through the lapels on your clothing like a Midwestern wind chill on a winter day.
The harsh fluorescent light beamed down on the dark black rubber floor and if you looked up, you were blinded. Trading booths were all over the place, dressed in drab gunmetal gray. Their sides were carpeted to dampen down the noise. Sound bounced up and down and all over, whizzing around the room like an untethered orb that had no compass, no sense of purpose or direction.
The floor itself was rigid and unforgiving. Black rubber, but it wasn’t flat. It was impregnated with one-inch round dots that protruded up an eighth of an inch from the floor. It was a monotone that ran from the door to forever. The raised edges were sharp, and if you fell, the floor would hit back and leave a mark.
If you were lucky enough to be in the trading room by yourself, the floor was still alive even with nobody there. The Siren song of time clocks on trading desks would click loudly breaking the silence in unison. “Clack”! as the minute changed. The noise was jarring. One was commanded to pay attention. Paper orders and trading cards sat neatly on desks, waiting to be abused. Trading pits were empty, and inanimate. But you could imagine them being filled to the brim with people sweating, clawing, and swaying to the beat of the market. Four clocks on the four corners of the floor would continuously click, hours, minutes, seconds. If you watched them long enough and listened to the clacks you could feel the tension rising inside you, as your blood pressure rose. Nothing was ever calming about a trading floor. Even with no one there, the trading floor aroma hung in the air like a thick humid day in New Orleans.
During market hours, the floor was lively. It jumped. It sung. It danced. It was surreal. The trading floor was another parallel universe that was inhabited by humans, but not of the normal hustle and bustle of human life. Instead of respecting personal space bubbles, the culture of the floor demanded that everyone was on top of everyone else. Standing closer than you’d sleep in bed with your partner, you could feel the sweat ooze out of your neighbors’ pores and into their clothes as the market moved. Their sweat stained you. Every move they made required that you move too. Every move you made was met with pressure from every side.
The floor smelled like something, not of this earth. It was a cologne of nervous sweat, snuffed-out cigarettes, farts that came from places no oxygen-breathing lifeform would survive in, bad breath, mint gum, and clothes that hadn’t been washed in a week. It wasn’t a tired smell but one of stress and active work, both physical, mental, and most of all emotional.
The pits were octagons and worked like thunder domes. Each thunder dome had its own unique culture and was populated by its own unique personalities that weren’t replicated anywhere else in the universe. What was de rigueur in one thunder dome might not be acceptable in the thunder dome that stood two feet away.
Peels of noise would emerge as the market ebbed and flowed. Noise would bubble over and out of the pit like a pot too hot to the boil. It would rise up to the ceiling, and then come down and crack you over the head. The noise forced you to notice and pay attention. “I am here. Make of me what you want.”, the noise said.
When it was quieter and the market slowed down, the floor sounded like the stubborn grunts of pigs on a farm. Some pigs would scurry to pick up crumbs on the floor and others would stoically wait for the next round of grain to pile in. The bile would build inside their gut, and there was no release. It fermented inside the gut like a pressure cooker with no relief valve.
The steps on the pits drilled down into the earth. Standing at the bottom of the pit and looking up felt like being at the bottom of Dante’s inferno in a later circle of hell. Even bodies that were under six feet tall towered above you. The harsh fluorescent light from the ceiling barely trickled into the bottom of the pit, and orders never did either. Multicolored jackets and badges with acronyms dazzled your eyes. The place seemed mystical with arms waving and shouts of incantations trying to get the market to move their way.
In a way, it was mystical. People turned their voices into cash like farmers plowing a field. Planting a seed was buying or selling and getting out of the trade was the harvest. Sometimes it was bountiful. Other times, it failed and left you a broken person.
On the top step of the pit were the order fillers. They threw nuts and bolts into the crowd to see if they could make anything out of them. Order fillers were paid by the contract. It was a strict commission arrangement and they had fixed costs of clerks that fed them the orders which flowed from the drab gray desks on the floor.
Order fillers could be robotic. Others were operatic. They had to adhere to a prescribed way of taking customer orders and filling them. However, they had their own flourishes. In many ways, they were no different than orchestra conductors waving their hands like a baton to keep the pit on the same cadence. Order fillers would compete with other order fillers to get the pit marching on their time. Like spectators at a tennis match, the local trader’s heads would spin, trying to figure out who to march with.
The next several steps down in the pit were populated by “the locals”. Jammed into the pit tighter than sardines in cans, fiercely independent, the locals traded their own accounts. They survived by their pluck and ate what they killed. Every January first, they started life at zero. Bigger locals would fight like a back-alley pit bull to grab space on the next level step closest to the largest order flow. Often they would bark at each other. Order flow was mother’s milk for a local. If you were at the bottom of the pit, you were doomed to be the runt of the litter.
Locals made lightning-fast decisions using their minds, emotions, and guts all at the same time. There was no Excel spreadsheet, no computer program, no decision tree, no patient series of committee meetings that tried to build consensus, and no extra time. It was now or never, and that moment could be gone for good. Miss it, and you might be doomed.
The market could be a beautiful lady. Round bouncing, bulging breasts looking tactile through a sheer shirt. Tight smooth curves running down into long legs, dancing, prancing, and teasing. Other times, the market was the devil incarnate. Bealzabub destroying everything in its path, but mostly just the valuations of trading accounts. Vampires descended, sucking all the lifeblood out of you and leaving your body, cold and dry.
No one could ever take the market and make it their wife. It wouldn’t be betrothed to anyone. The market couldn’t be tamed. Sometimes it was slutty, giving you everything you could ask for, and other times it turned into a two-bit whore, leaving you with a venereal disease you had to go get a prescription to cure.
The average prescription was alcohol. Bars around exchange floors were packed with traders. Traders who, like sailors before them, had come home from the sea with tales to tell. They had risked it all, and while some of the stories were true, many were spun from whole cloth. There were tales of mermaids and sea monsters. Tales of rogue waves overrunning the deck and their fight to save the ship. More alcohol would flow and the tales would go longer. Songs would be sung and peels of laughter would break through the walls of the bar so loud passers-by would stop and look.
The camaraderie among traders was thick. Your word was your bond, and you didn’t trust outsiders. Break that bond, and you were crucified, dead, and buried. Never to rise again.
Some traders needed more than the daily dopamine hit they got on the floor. When they weren’t out to sea, they missed the adrenaline rush. Candy went up their nose as they took hit after hit to keep it going. The Columbian Marching Powder fueled fake energy. Eventually, they became ghosts of themselves. Instead of being in control of the ship, they’d become men overboard. Driftless. If they couldn’t find a life preserver for themselves, the sharks would consume them mercilessly. No one left the boat to get a man overboard. It was every man for himself.
However, if you made a tactical trading mistake, plenty of arms would reach out and lift you back into the boat. Salves would be administered, and confidence restored. An order filler might give you a wink and a decent chance at making a quick buck would come your way. Given the chance, you’d reach out and help a fellow too if you could. Or, if you were both sinking, you’d grab onto each other and hang on for dear life trying to keep your heads above the ocean so you didn’t drown. When you made it back, you’d hug each other and share a shot and a beer. Your story would go down in the ledger of history and the tale retold again and again.
The physical side of trading floor life was hard enough. The mental and emotional side was harder. There were few constraints on your life when you were on a trading floor. It was the ultimate freedom. One day, you could shop at the finest luxury retailer in the world and command the respect of all who served you. The next day, you might be at Walmart in the self-checkout line. There was always money, and the handcuffs money brought with it. You could only trade as big as you could afford. But, many people never traded as big as they could afford because something inside them wouldn’t let them go.
Chicken Little had nothing on the trading floor. Fear was the most dominant emotion on a trading floor. Fear of missing out. Fear of losing it all. Fear of failure. Fear of what would happen if you failed. Fear of success. Fear of nothing happening. Fear of the unknown. Fear of being in a trade, and not being able to get out. Fear of seeing a friend fail. Fear of not being able to come back tomorrow and face all those fears again.
Outside of the trading floor in the human environment, traders strutted around like peacocks. When wearing a trading jacket you were a master of the universe. Member of a rarified club. You spoke a language and used sign language few would ever hope to know. You were able to translate that language into something everyone in the world prized, money. Midas never had it so good. Money money money money, huge sums of money.
There was no limit. Nothing was unattainable or unaffordable if you traded for it. There wasn’t a faster jet, a better hotel room, a better bottle of wine, or a more sparkling jewel. Money was the ocean the trading floor floated on. There was an unlimited amount of supply until there wasn’t. When the money dried up, there wasn’t anything you could afford. A small expenditure felt like a deep paper cut and constantly gnawed at your soul. It festered and bled. It became infected and it tugged at you until it killed you.
The trading floor was its own world, its own atmosphere with its own oxygen that fed the people who populated it. The corporate suits that gawked through the looking glass in the visitors’ gallery would never understand. There were no guarantees that you could stay aboard. There were no guarantees the floor and its people would accept you. The only guarantee a trading floor gave you is that no matter who you were or where you came from, you had a chance.
Great writing. To me the floor represented the best of times as well as the worst of times! It could be glorious or extremely sad on any given day. It is survival of the fittest and a place where you learn to stand up and be counted. It was a place where you would never be able to know everybody but you learned quickly who to know and where to be to be successful. You learned about good guys and bad guys and bag men. Yo loved the adrenaline rush of working in a pit that brought you back each day. You couldn’t think of anywhere else you would rather be.
Nothing like working in a room with 3,500 of your best friends who might hate you when you're not looking.