gummy-stuff.org Markets as machinery · and the arithmetic underneath

Section 03 · 3 entries

The Room

Where trading physically happened.

Three entries on the physical arrangements that matching required before it was electronic, and on the vocabulary that outlived them.

A busy trading floor viewed from a gallery above
Fig. 1

Seen from the gallery the machinery is people. The rule about who spoke first mattered because a crowd cannot remember on its own.

Photo: New York Stock Exchange, Manhattan, New York · Wikimedia Commons

The entries