things at once. At any given moment, he’s supposed to be buying or selling several different stocks, each trade requiring him to be at a different specialist’s post. Also, the buy or sell demands come with complicating instructions —“Limit orders,” “Stop orders,” “Fill or kill”—with meanings like “Don’t buy for more than such-and-such,” “Sell if it gets to so-and-so,” “Buy this much or nothing.” “I have to ask my clerks,” says David, “‘Do I have time to pee?’” David moves from post to post. I can barely keep up with where he’s going, let alone with what he’s doing. More than 3,000 corporations are listed on the NYSE. Their stock is worth more than $9 trillion. The New York Stock Exchange is the Super Bowl of money. Being allowed on the trading floor is like being allowed on the football field during the game and getting to follow the players around. Under the circumstances, Q&A is necessarily truncated. Finally, around noon, there was a pause. I had the chance to pose a question. There was so much I needed to know. There were thousands of puzzling aspects to the stock market. Possible queries flooded my mind. “What’s with the ugly jackets?” I asked. David’s was a polyester-cotton blend, with a lawn-and-leaf-bag shape in the prescribed, and horrible, color of his brokerage house. It was rumpled and creased and slightly sweat stained. The sides bulged with notepads, order books, and memoranda. Twenty pens and pencils were shoved into the breast pocket. “You wreck your clothes,” said David. The traders wear dress shirts, expensive neckties, and well-tailored trousers, but most of them leave their suit coats in the members’ lounge, and their wing tips, too. They put on the gaudy sack blazers and the least-fashionable kind of lumpy sneakers. As a result, the average trader is dressed like a combination bank president, produce manager, and ghetto kid who lets his mom pick out his shoes. Nike and Tommy Hilfiger doing a NYSE line of clothes is not really a bad idea. We in the general public have an idea that there’s something WASPy or, anyway, stuffy about the stock market. But the accents belie this. There are WASPs on the floor, saying “fuck” with the best of them. But the traders are predominately Jewish, Italian, and, most predominately of all, Irish. The NYSE is the Brooklyn of fifty years ago. (And one reason fuck may be used
Made with FlippingBook - professional solution for displaying marketing and sales documents online