Thain confronted the floor traders and, bit by bit, convinced them that their future lay with digits.
At one point early this decade federal regulators looked at whether Greenberg had improperly influenced floor traders at the NYSE.
Or "specialists"--the floor traders who get exclusive access to order flows in exchange for the obligation to maintain an orderly market?
You'll get nicked a bit by the options floor traders, but probably less than the costs incorporated in the broker-sold note.
The NYSE was founded by floor traders in 1792, and pretty much all of its members had strong ties to the floor dating back generations.
When I profiled Joseph last September, he was a recovering math doctoral student who had hooked up with some floor traders to form a trading firm.
Disadvantage: getting nicked by floor traders on the futures exchange.
Thus armed, day traders are adding a high-tech twist to the well-worn momentum game that exchange-floor traders have played for decades: Buy when markets are rising and sell when they turn south.
Joseph worked with two former floor traders to come up with some algorithms that appear to find a niche and scoop up some of the pennies that the bigger shops leave behind.
Over at the Big Board, brand new trading rooms are being closed and floor traders and specialists are being laid off because more trading is being done through NYSE's Arca and hybrid trading programs.
Involvement in two dozen new electronic trading ventures could put Goldman at the center of a new financial world--and someday may even threaten the existence of the floor traders and securities salesmen that made Goldman great.
Instead, director James Allen Smith spent a year and a half filming Chicago's colorful floor traders as they swapped futures and options contracts and struggled to adapt to the new era of electronic and high-frequency trading.
The boom over the last six years coincides with the introduction of electronic trading side-by-side with floor traders at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (nyse: CME - news - people ) and the Board of Trade.
The ongoing role of the floor traders and specialists is still a matter of debate, but the planned Archipelago transaction has boosted optimism that at least the NYSE is heading into the future with a more competitive, electronic-oriented business model.
On Tuesday, floor traders wound up the day processing orders manually, using paper, pencil and in some cases white board to keep track of buy and sell orders, instead of using the electronic trading system that is supposed to be the show-piece of the hybrid model.
Thain, a former banker at Goldman Sachs Group (nyse: GS - news - people ) (which incidentally advised the two parties in the transaction), has been studying ways to boost electronic trading on the exchange without stepping on the toes of its floor traders.
Not only do NYSE and Archipelago executives have to get along in a new publicly traded company, but the NYSE's network of floor traders, known as specialists, will have to find a way to survive in a company that will put a greater emphasis on electronic trading (see: " Dumb Like A Trader").
At the same time, it promised to keep the pits open until trading volume became insignificant, spruced up its electronic trading software, passed out 250 handhelds to traders, opened a computer room so that floor brokers and traders can practice online trading and courted electronic trading groups popping up worldwide.
'Twas the day before Christmas and all through the floor, few traders were trading, before walking out the door.
For many, it was hard to tell which side of the system broke down worse--the electronic messaging system or the dwindling number of floor-based traders who use it.
He insists that the traditional system of floor-based traders who make markets in assigned stocks and step in and put up their own capital in times of extreme volatility, like Tuesday, will stick around.
The ebb and flow of financial markets used to conjure up images of yelling, jacketed traders on the floor of an exchange.
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It fell more than 300 points before a late-day rally prompted cheers from the traders on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, when the average surged into positive territory.
The programs bring traders onto the floor of the exchange, into the pits where options are traded every day, and include classroom sessions on everything from the history of options to lessons on selling covered calls.
Traders on the NYSE floor said they felt blindsided Wednesday.
The exchange is reviewing the trades of some of its specialists - traders on the NYSE floor who manage the buying and selling of shares - to check for any "undue" dealer intervention.
The traders and salesmen on the floor paid as little attention as they could to these walks.
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