Jazz With Money
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I’ll never forget my first time on the trading floor. My boss took me there to meet the Managing Director (MD) who would be our client. It was an enormous space for midtown Manhattan. It felt like a city at the core of the city.
The floor was stacked aisle to aisle with desks and computer monitors. MILLIONS of monitors. They seemed to be growing out of the desks like trees in the forest. The phones buzzed constantly from all directions, devolving into a steady yet chaotic pattern.
I watched the traders. Some were fixated on their screens, others were on talking into their headsets. Some were yelling out loud, and others speaking softly. Some appeared to be just goofing off. Networking is what they call it.
I spied on their monitors. They were covered in charts and graphs and grids full of data. Colorful, flickering, scrolling data. It was all noise and nonsense to me. But it was beautiful noise and nonsense. I don’t know why it seemed beautiful, but it did then and it still does.
I didn’t have any real understanding of what I was witnessing. But I could tell that it was a language and a culture. It could seem like gibberish to outsiders, but it had rules and structure and meaning. In that way trading was like jazz, but with money.
The thing I had learned about jazz culture was that it wrapped itself in the trappings of freedom and wanton creativity, but in reality everything followed a strict protocol that you just have to learn from watching because you can’t get it out of any book. The ability to follow the undocumented protocol is what separates the ones who know from the ones who don’t.
“Quite an operation you’ve got here,” I said as I met the MD.
He smiled, “This is nothing kid. You should have been here a couple years ago.”
