Replies to post #21867 on CMKM Diamonds Inc. (fka CMKX)

[Capitalist]

Sorry to butt in, but are you two talking about a trading floor for a wall street member firm, or for an exchange?

The NYSE, AMEX, BSE, PHLX, CME, Midwest Exchange, Pacific Exchange, Berlin Bremer Exchange, etc.. are all physical exchanges and thus each has a trading floor where buyers and sellers meet. Some of these exchanges use an open outcry system, while others use a specialist system.

However, the term "trading floor" is more commonly used in the financial industry to refer to office spaces where the employees of a brokerage house, bank, insurance house, or other financial institutions conduct trading on behalf of that firm or it's customers. These "trading floors" look basically like what you'd see in the movie "Office Space", NOT what you see each day on CNBC when Alexis is reporting and getting shoved around...

For instance, I used to work on Fidelity's trading floor in Merrimack, NH when I took orders from their retail customers. Later, I worked as a trainer/consultant for the entire group of traders who worked on a similar trading floor in Smithfield, RI. These "trading floors" were where we effected trades on behalf of our retail or institutional clients. In addition to that, we had other trading floors in Boston where traders took positions in bonds and equities on behalf of the firm itself (a very high stress job to be sure).

However, the closest I ever came to being on an EXCHANGE TRADING FLOOR (like the one you see every day on CNBC) was when I went to the Boston Stock Exchange to see if they had a visitor's gallery there (they don't).

As to whether or not a brokerage firm's trading floor could be used as a backup for an actual exhange floor, I have never heard of such a thing, but then again I was a trader, not a contingency planner.

I would think it would have some challenges however, as an exchange floor is generally designed around a series of centralized trading "posts" where the specialist firm reps are, with clerks taking incoming orders from banks of phones along the outer walls. This architecture is vastly different from the typical structure of a member firm's trading floor, which just consists of rows of desks, each with a phone and computer system.