Friday, April 30, 2010

New film captures waning heyday of Chicago trading pits (Reuters)

CHICAGO (Reuters) – The loud, colorful traders who shove for deals in Chicago's famous open-outcry pits right away face an even greater hazard than the advent of electronic dealing systems -- the algorithmic trade, says the executive of the brand new documentary charting the demise of building trading.

More the living wake than the eulogy, the movie "Floored" that debuted upon Friday recounts the transition from the bustling salad days of rugged alpha males to the marketplace dominated by faceless computer-based traders across the globe.

It's sink or swim for the maestro pit traders featured in the film, struggling to conform from the world of multicolored jackets as well as keen hand signals to executing trades with the series of keystrokes during home in the suburbs.

"The comparison guy, the man fundamentally similar to me who is not mechanism orientated, they're gone -- they have been out of the business," Joe Bedore, vice boss of building trade for INTL/FC Stone, told Reuters.

But it's not the last chapter, warns executive James Allen Smith, who traded mini-stock index futures electronically as well as spent the little time in the pits of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange as well as the Chicago Board of Trade -- right away joined -- prior to he filmed the documentary over the three-year period.

"We talk about the building starting to the mouse. But obviously what's happened from there is the rodent is right away starting to completely programmed trading," Smith, 37, pronounced in an talk prior to his initial movie shows in slight release in Chicago, New York as well as Washington.

"Let's say five years ago we jumped off the building as well as proposed trade upon the computer, well right away we have been removing smoked by programmed systems. That's the subsequent chapter."

The number of floor ! traders< /span> has shrunk to just 1,000 compared to more than 10,000 during the 1990s, according to the film. Only about the third of all traders successfully have the transition from building to screen, the single maestro CBOT building merchant pronounced upon Friday.

"It just takes the all different kind of chairman to stay upon your feet as well as roar as well as yell all day in the brooding sourroundings than it does to lay patiently as well as sensitively in the room as well as click the mouse," Smith pronounced in an interview.

"You can't see any other in the eye, as well as that's what these guys were pros during -- they were masters during reading emotion."

For the little of the traders, the movie was the approach to safety the lost approach of hold up for the subsequent generation.

"The floors that were shown have been no longer there (at the former CME location) -- the owners chopped them up," Joseph Gibbons, the former building merchant who proposed in 1985 as well as right away trades financial futures from his home, pronounced during the screening. "This was the approach to get something done to show the kids."

(Reporting by Michael Hirtzer, Editing by Jonathan Leff)



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