Do Floor Traders Still Exist

There are a lot of people in trading firms who grew up with floor trading and don t want to give it up either because they feel more comfortable with it or because they might lose their job if they went away from it.

Do floor traders still exist.

Floor trading still exists but it is responsible for a rapidly diminishing share of market activity just 10 in 2017 according to a cnbc report. The days of pit trading have ended. Skilled floor brokers can often get better execution better pricing by working the order with other traders something that electronic systems generally cannot do so well. Execs acknowledge that the traders are useful for marketing but say there s more to it than that.

However a few exchanges still have physical traders on the floor or located at the exchange. Traders are still trading on the floor of. Why the new york stock exchange nyse still has human brokers on the trading floor quartz. I ve always wondered why there are still people on the floor of the new york stock exchange.

After working as a runner and clerk on the trading floor he was a trader on the screen for years before asking last year to return to the floor as a trader in the 10 year treasury options pit. Listener john wang who dabbles in a little online trading wrote in to ask this. Floor traders used to use the open outcry method in the pit of a commodity or stock exchange but now most of them use electronic trading systems and do not appear in the pit. One example is the london metal exchange which still trades parts of the session in a ring which is synonymous with a pit.

Non electronic stock exchanges still exist because they used to exist.