Trading Floor Quotes

Little-known fact: When the stock exchange closes, the guy who comes out on the balcony with that big hammer slams it on the head of the person who lost the most money that day.

It seemed glamorous when I used to go into work and get to be on a trading floor or see how the business worked a little bit before I ever understood what it was.

Maybe one of the strangest opportunities was I got to ring the closing bell on the New York Stock Exchange.

I don't think Wall Street people in general are smart. I think that's one of the biggest myths in American lore. They're tough, aggressive, greedy, quick thinking but I don't think they're particularly smart at all.

SM is an abbreviation of both stock market and sadomasochism-- and there are those who think they are one and the same.

This is Wall Street, and today is important. Because tomorrow, July 4th, I intended to make my first million dollars--an excitingday in a man's life. The enterprise was slightly illegal.

I don't know if you heard the news, but Wall Street now is a farmer's market. I don't want to say things are going downhill quickly, but Obama's new campaign slogan is 'Are you better off than you were four days ago?'

On Wall Street, there is no "Wall Street"; there are individuals.

In college I started studying the stock market. I went down to the stock exchange, watched all the activity from the visitors' gallery, people running around, calling numbers, shouting, and all the paper flying and the bells ringing, and of course that was exciting, and it seemed to lend itself to my analytical skills.

I loved working on Wall Street. I loved the meritocracy of it and the camaraderie of the trading floor.

I worked on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange back when they used to write tickets. And I was just a runner. So a guy would write a ticket and I would run it, and it was endless. That was a hard job. And I dug tungsten... for a coal company in Wyoming one summer, and that was pretty miserable.

One day I visited a guy who had made a fortune as a broker. He was sitting in his office with his computer. I hire people from here and make deals from this room, he told me. Then he took me to the trading room. Nobody was talking to anybody else, the place was silent as a tomb, they were all sitting there watching their terminals - a great word, terminal. I tell you, it scares the crap out of me.

Walk across any of the trading floors - they are full of 29-year-old kids. The capital markets of America are controlled by a bunch of right-out-of-business-school young guys who haven't really seen that much.

Auctions are bizarre combinations of slave market, trading floor, theatre and burlesque... a lot of people are going to be making a lot of excuses or maintaining that they were never part of this.

Wall Street. - The abode of the Brokers and the Broke.