Friday 10 May 2019

The Skinny On Trading Rooms

By Catherine Hamilton


People who have worked in asset management are all familiar with the environment that traders stay in. While most trading rooms are already filled with computers already, there was a time when it was just phones that the traders used to close deals while analyzing the charts. For those who have a genuine interest in the financial world, here are some things to know about these trading floors.

As mentioned above, this is where the deals are taking place so it is really where all the action in Wall Street is. Just to give a brief background, these areas started popping out back in the late sixties to early seventies when each type of investment had their own department in banks and asset management companies. Banks found it much easier to lump them all in one place where they could be monitored, thus the dealing room was born.

When the dealing room first existed, it just contained a phone and a teleprinter, which were the two tools a broker used. The teleprinter was the machine that gave the financial quotes wherein the broker would print them out. The information printed out would be last price, lowest, highest, and volume.

Of course, eventually the 1900s showed the advance of higher technology wherein the usual teleprinter was replaced by what was known as a tele register. That was what happened when the New York Stock Exchange boomed and the volume of trades for various securities went up. Of course, this meant that more phones were contained in the room and so were electronic calculators.

Eventually, the eighties saw a more advanced technology come into the picture known as spreadsheets. This eventually came out along with the Windows OS. Microsoft Excel became the popular choice for traders because it had special formulas to make computations and an organized structure.

Of course, the digital revolution eventually featured more advanced software with video display. The dealing room evolved from just becoming a room where people shout stock prices to a room filled with computers where trades are made electronically instead of phones. All the information can already be found in the computers and designated software.

Computers eventually became the staple of the dealing room wherein software or even cloud based applications are used for analyzing the charts. These days, one would now have charts with built in indicators that update themselves in real time. This allows the traders to do technical analysis with much sharper precision than they did before.

Now, the thing about dealing floors is that they are always associated with Wall Street simply because that is where all of the cool stuff happens. No matter what the dealing room contains, it will always be where the traders will make the money and close the trades. For those who have watched movies like Wall Street or the Big Short and have enjoyed them thoroughly, learn more about where the Wall Street traders play by knowing more about trading floors.




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