Eat the Rich

adjective with every possible meaning except “sexual intercourse.” Around the walls of the NYSE trading rooms are the tiny workstations grandiosely called “telephone booths”—more than 1,200 of them. In the middle of the rooms are the horseshoe-shaped counters with banks of video screens overhead, the “trading posts.” Here the hollering middle-aged men gather, looking like they’re doing something foolish. This is what we see on television. The middle-aged men are there because of the specialist brokers. Each specialist has a location at a trading post, and every stock that’s listed on the NYSE is assigned to one specialist. If a floor broker wants to buy or sell a certain stock, he has to go to the specialist’s post. The broker who goes to a post is called the “trading crowd” even if he’s the only person in it. Although usually he isn’t, because the cattle-herd instinct is as strong on Wall Street as it is, for example, in a cattle herd. The specialist’s job is to give a “quotation” on the stock—to tell the trading crowd the highest price that anybody is currently willing to pay for a share and the lowest price at which anybody is willing to dump it. The video screens above the trader’s head show the last price at which a stock was traded and whether that price was an “uptick,” a “downtick,” or no tick at all. The stock “ticker” running around the room is a compilation of the trading prices from all the specialists’ posts. What’s going on in the trading crowd is a double-jointed, Hydra-hatted auction—as though Sotheby’s had a dozen guys with gavels, each with the same Rembrandt, and not only could the bidders raise their prices but the auctioneers could lower theirs. It sounds complicated because you and I don’t buy a lot of Rembrandts at Sotheby’s. But shopping for a car this way would be a pleasure. You want a Lexus. You know exactly how much the last Lexus sold for—with the same option package you intend to get. All the Lexus dealers in the world are in one place. You can hear their lowest prices. You don’t have to read their fibbing newspaper ads or spend all day traveling to their dealerships in the outer ’burbs and getting soft-soaped. All the Lexus buyers are in one place, too. You can listen to each of them bargaining. Now you know—to the fraction of a dollar— how much you should pay for a Lexus. To an outsider, however, especially an outsider being assed and elbowed aside and trod upon by people walking at thirty-five mph, it is confusion. And the language doesn’t help. The hollering is done in a form precisely dictated by the stock exchange. The number of shares is expressed in units of a hundred. At

Made with FlippingBook - professional solution for displaying marketing and sales documents online