

Panic And Loathing From The S&P 500 Pits (Audio feed from a seasoned trader) - kvs
http://www.zerohedge.com/article/panic-and-loathing-sp-500-pits

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jreposa
Anyone care to translate?

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arthurdent
pretty interesting tidbid: the pit language and structure is highly specific
and has developed built in redundancy to prevent misunderstandings.

the word "for" typically only represents bids or purchases and the word "at"
typically represents offers or sales.

so you can sell AT price X, but you don't sell FOR price X (some people say it
wrong, but old timers tend to hate it).

typically to represent an offer you'd say "i'm [price] offered" or "i'm at
[price]", but to represent a bid you'd say "i'm [price] bid" you'll notice he
says "i'm offered AT [price]", but you wouldn't say you're bid "for" [price],
you'd say "i'm [price] bid"

additionally in transactions, you'd say: sell [quantity] at [price] pay
[price] on [quantity] inverting the structure gives another sanity check when
people are checking trades verbally.

and those guys have insanely good memory, because they make these trades by
word of mouth then card it (write up a paper slip) after the fact. when its
busy, you can be carding trades up well after the fact and many trades later.

in the pit

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arthurdent
and when you indicate prices with your fingers, palms in for bids or
purchases, and palms out for sales or offers.

yes, people still do that by holding up the number of fingers of the price
they want. yes, its archaic.

but frankly, the electronic markets tend to do really poorly in these
situations. its hard to get a "real" 2-sided market in panics and all the
liquidity is relly in the pits.

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esspem
If you can't access the original post, the audio is here:
[http://www.zerohedge.com.nyud.net/sites/default/files/Market...](http://www.zerohedge.com.nyud.net/sites/default/files/Market%20Crash.mp3)
or here: <http://www.mediafire.com/?ug2o5yngzyw>

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maukdaddy
Wow. Oddly enough this sounds like someone announcing a horse race.

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jared314
Why do we have people in the pits again?

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hugothefrog
Don't suppose anyone grabbed a copy of the audio while it was still up?

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gokhan
Site is down but my download manager continues to grab the file. Strange.

[http://www.zerohedge.com/sites/default/files/Market%20Crash....](http://www.zerohedge.com/sites/default/files/Market%20Crash.mp3)

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hugothefrog
Thanks. I picked it up via curl, but it was crashing Firefox.

It's up at <http://dl.dropbox.com/u/2169086/Market%20Crash.mp3> for a while,
now.

Not a pleasant experience listening to that. Perhaps that's the way the world
will end - not with a roar, or a whimper, but pure panic.

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rgrieselhuber
It's down now.

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d_c
Frightening.

