The Skinny On Trading Rooms

By Catherine Hamilton


If one has watched movies like The Wolf of Wall Street, then he or she might be familiar with those areas wherein people are shouting stock prices. Well, these areas are known as trading rooms and they are places in which stock or other transactions would take place. If one has always been fascinated by Wall Street, then here are a few facts to know about these places.

Now, first thing to know is that these places are also known as dealing rooms because that is where they transact deals. These areas became popular sometime in the seventies wherein a lot of investment types came out such as bonds, stocks, foreign exchange, and funding. Because most of these investment types were scattered to various departments, banks decided it was easier to put them all together in a designated dealing room.

Now, when the dealing room started out, only a phone and a teleprinter was found there as that was the only tools a broker used. The teleprinter gave the price quotes as well as printed them out on a special piece of paper. The teleprinter would print out the highs, lows, and last price of the investment.

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.

Today, there are special graphs with indicators that can be used for overall technical analysis for trades. Back before the software were invented, fundamental analysis was used more often since graphs could not be updated quickly and real time. However, the real time updating of the graphs enabled the traders to have more precise trades for their clients.

Now as one can see, the dealing room has evolved over time ever since the technology in the financial world evolved as well. From simple tele registers to telephones, computers replaced the usual people who are shouting prices from brokers to other traders because computers can pass information much faster than voice can. So for those who have always been very curious about what happens in those Wall Street offices, the first place to visit is definitely the trading room since that is where all the action is.




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