Uptick, downtick: Traders soldier on
The war is everywhere, on every screen here. But nowhere is it as immediate and measurable, day in and day out, as on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange.
Since the start of the war investors have found truth, however fleeting, in the dramatic scenes from Iraq. Usually they look to a thousand disparate bits of information before placing their bets -- from a quarterly report to a bill in Congress or a scandal in an industry. But now, at a moment when investors, like everyone else, find the future hard to fathom -- and not just economically -- they have fallen captive to the vagaries of war and are trading off of CNN headlines seconds after they appear.
And why is the market so locked into events in Baghdad?
There is a common perception that the outcome of the war could heal or cripple an already ailing economy. Which makes about as much sense as deciding to break up with your boyfriend because of what your horoscope says that day.
Even Robert H. McCooey Jr., a NYSE floor broker, is skeptical about the wisdom of predicting the direction of the economy based on yesterday’s battles. However, he is, in his way, a good soldier, a patriot of the business of America. It isn’t flags he waves. Rather, it’s buy and sell orders.
And so he absorbs what he needs from three newspapers during his morning commute from Rye, but checks his emotions and opinions in a locker along with his wingtips and suit jacket before he walks onto the floor of the exchange each morning. He dons a durable blue blazer and pair of cushy-soled shoes and starts “talking” on his wireless hand-held computer, advising his clients when it’s a good time to enter the market. He maneuvers the floor with a peripheral eye on the news -- a press briefing at the Pentagon, air strikes in southern Iraq.
If the economy recovers, this is where it will happen, on the floor of the exchange, itself an obvious terrorism target around the corner from where it all began at the World Trade Center.
“A lot of things are going on in the geopolitical scene and we’re all glued to the TV, glued to headlines to keep up,” says McCooey, who is president and founder of the Griswold Co.
And so when missiles are aimed at Saddam Hussein’s palace, there is an uptick in the market.
When allied troops can’t take Basra, and a suicide bomber takes out soldiers at a checkpoint, there is a downtick.
Donald Rumsfeld brays that victory might take longer than anticipated: a 195-point downtick.
Iraqis wave and welcome allied troops. Uptick.
Hussein appears on television. Downtick.
All this news funnels into screens on the trading floor’s 50,000 square feet of activity. All that complexity becomes a simple equation of profit and loss. The Dow is the scoreboard.
Normally, personal trading screens around Wall Street look like Christmas -- with stocks that are up in green and those that are down in red. But since March 20, the start of the war, the colors change in unison day to day, all red to all green, and all because of a small window in the corner of the screen that carries the news.
But what do these daily battle reports add up to, anyway? The generals aren’t even sure. Still, portfolio managers and economists seem to divine something, and then use that to decide how individual stocks will be affected. They dial direct to the NYSE floor or e-mail their marching orders.
At 9:30 a.m. on Thursday, the opening bell rings and the typically frenetic McCooey, who is 37 and solidly built, moves fast around the floor. In the last weeks, with all the volatility, his reactions have had to be even swifter. He scoots between “hot spots” where stocks are under siege. An airline stock is plummeting at one post. A hotel management firm is in play in another. It is close quarters on the NYSE floor. One post is so jammed with men in green blazers that it looks like the St. Patrick’s Day parade.
Finally, the giant digital clock behind McCooey reads 9:49:13. The opening roar is over and the floor is already littered with executed, canceled and look-see orders. McCooey stands still long enough to gaze up at a television. All the financial cable shows are now running round-the-clock war coverage. There are Arabs jeering U.S. troops on the screen. McCooey shrugs. “I discount the propaganda from the other side. Their spin meisters aren’t as good as ours. I almost feel bad for them. The inevitable outcome is on the horizon.”
Then he buzzes off to the RBK post, where Reebok’s stock is being traded, to check out the movement for a client who has canceled his order but who McCooey knows “wants to buy it even if he isn’t ready right now.”
After the Persian Gulf War of 1991, the market plunged for a while and there was a stampede that led to a longer rally. Yet, as wars have been compressed from centuries to decades to years to weeks to days, so too have the tallies of their effect on the market. But it is really too early to know how this weeks-old war will shape the market in the long run.
“You are always trying to ballpark,” McCooey says. “But this is more art than science.”
He smiles wisely, pushing back his wire-rim glasses, this soldier of commerce. He is not Ivy League or a master of the universe who pretends to know all. Rather, he is a Holy Cross grad and the son of a floor trader who begat five trader sons, and the father of his own brood of six.
Robert H. McCooey III is 10 years old and has no interest, as yet, in this life.
“My father didn’t want us to follow him because of the psychological drain of the early morning and late night,” says McCooey.
But he and his brothers were drawn to the split-second excitement. “It’s different every day,” says McCooey. “There is not a war every day, not a recession every year, not an Enron or a WorldCom every season.”
Now he is living off the hope that a rousing victory will buoy the market and the market will buoy the country. He believes that the dollar and the beautiful American way that it breathes are mightier than a Middle Eastern despot.
