Downs, ups are his stock in trade
Just after 9 a.m. Wednesday, the glass doors on the trading floor of the New York Stock Exchange burst open, and the symphony begins.
“How’s Cisco?” a trader shouts.
“What are you saying on Goldman?” yells another.
“Let’s go! Let’s go!”
Feet shuffle, fans whoosh, televisions blare, cameras click, electronic devices chime like slot machines.
No one knows what today will bring. Before the opening bell in New York, traders survey world markets: down in Hong Kong, in Australia, South Korea, India, Singapore, China, Britain, Germany and France.
Will the Dow Jones industrial average plummet? Will it surprise everyone and soar? Will this day on the trading floor foreshadow what is to come for the rest of us? Another job lost? A further diminished 401(k)?
Ted Weisberg races through the morning clusters of colleagues, getting briefings on the trading floor. He arrived early this morning, changing out of the navy-blue suit coat and dress shoes he wore to work and into a more comfortable ventilated jacket and black sneakers. In the madness of any given day, he often skips lunch or breaks.
Today the trader is feeling refreshed, back from a vacation in Bermuda. He left Friday, after the market recovered from a 700-point plunge to close 128 points down, capping the worst week in the Dow’s history since the Great Depression.
With 40 years on the floor, Weisberg, 68, is an experienced hand when it comes to its bustle and swings. As he whizzes around corners, co-workers recognize his freckled, partly bald head encircled in a white puff of hair. He peers through square-framed spectacles to read updates on international markets. He pokes at a hand-held E-broker, an electronic device that manages orders.
Daniel Ustian, chief executive of Navistar International Corp., rings the brass opening bell, but Weisberg pays no attention. He’s been around for more than enough famous bell-ringers: Puff Daddy, Olympian Michael Phelps, President Reagan, the current President Bush.
Within minutes, the Dow is down 83, 104, 94.
Weisberg whips back to his desk at his booth on the floor, where there are stools, yet he never sits. Multiple screens on the wall above his head offer a montage of information -- stock prices, business news, e-mails. It is multi-tasking at the blinking speed of modern technology.
“If you cannot walk and chew gum, this is not the business for you,” Weisberg says. When it comes to customers, he adds, “we are their eyes and ears on the trading floor.”
Economic reports released early Wednesday by the Commerce Department showed that retail sales plummeted last month by nearly double what had been expected. That has investors worried.
“If Main Street can’t spend any money, you see how we connect the dots between Main Street and Wall Street?” Weisberg says. “We’re all dependent on each other in an economic sense.”
Weisberg’s colleague David Henderson of Raven Securities Corp. stops by. Last week, Henderson wore a red jacket to work. The color signals to his work buddies that he believes the market will fall. Today he’s wearing a green jacket, which means he’s confident it will rise.
“It’s bad. It’s the worst calamity affecting our institution,” Henderson says. “But the Feds and the Treasury are pulling out all the stops.”
Weisberg looks up at the green numbers flickering on a digital ticker: The Dow is down 220. A second later, it is down 217. Weisberg has grown accustomed to the falls. “It’s like a non-moment,” he says. “You get used to it.”
Before the rush of stock orders and sales surges through cyberspace, and before billions of dollars begin to flow through this building’s veins, the New York Stock Exchange stands dignified, as it has for 105 years, unshaken beneath the sun-bleached morning sky.
The public has not been allowed inside since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. The visitors gallery that overlooks the trading floor is closed. The streets around the NYSE are blocked to traffic, and police stationed outside wear bulletproof vests and hold machine guns.
In recent days, passersby may have noticed triplets in matching business suits holding briefcases overflowing with fake money as they jiggle tin cans of change, protesting the recent Wall Street bailout plans.
Inside the mausoleum-style structure, 72-foot-high walls harbor the secrets and lore of this so-called temple of finance. On its lustrous marble-clad facade is a sculpture entitled “Integrity Protecting the Works of Man,” in which a goddess welcomes the uncertainty of the day with outstretched arms.
Throughout stock market crashes, public panics, lavish times and terrorist attacks, the heartbeat of this building stops only for weekends, holidays and national tragedies.
Hurried traders and brokers make their way in and out of the exchange for smoke breaks. They hold cups of coffee and greet veteran security guards by name. Once through the revolving doors, they pass through security scanners and metal detectors. One floor worker brings in a copy of “A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose.”
On the trading floor, banners that read “The World Puts Stock in Us” hang from ceilings etched with gold tobacco leaves, one of the first commodities ever traded in the U.S.
In the center sit specialists, like the ones at Bank of America’s island and, next door, from Barclays Capital. On the perimeter, brokers and traders work out of their booths.
Weisberg’s company, Seaport Securities, has a stretch of booths near “the Garage,” an additional trading floor built off to the side of the main section in 1922. Bottles of ketchup and cough syrup line shelves by where traders work.
By 10 a.m., the Dow is down 332 points.
“It’s not the end of the world,” Weisberg says. “You still have your health. This is just a sideshow.”
A few minutes later, a friend tells him a former colleague has passed away. The wake is this weekend.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Weisberg says in disbelief. He runs to a telephone.
For a moment, the tickers, the trades, the swings of the Dow all seem to stop.
Weisberg might be the only trader who remembers “Pittsburgh Phil,” as people here used to call him because no one knew his last name. Pittsburgh Phil was one of 1,366 members of the New York Stock Exchange who bought seats on the floor for $2.3 million each -- before it became a publicly owned entity in 2006.
He lived in Pittsburgh and only showed up at the bottom of the market, when he would stroll around the floor wearing a tweed jacket, holding his shopping list of stocks. Then he would disappear for months or years.
“Miraculously,” Weisberg remembers, “the markets would eventually rally after Pittsburgh Phil’s visit.”
Weisberg hasn’t seen him for decades. But after Friday, Weisberg found himself asking jokingly: “Where’s Pittsburgh Phil?”
The NYSE is no longer the clamoring, arm-flailing, sweaty workplace of Weisberg’s past. It is not the NYSE captured in movies like Oliver Stone’s “Wall Street,” which was filmed on the floor after trading hours, at the height of a bull market, and released two months after the 1987 stock market crash.
What was known as “the crowd” -- nearly 3,000 traders, specialists, brokers and clerks who used to shimmy past one another to buy and sell -- no longer jam-packs this 109-foot-by-140-foot floor space. Now, about 1,000 floor workers employed by different firms show up. The others have been replaced by computers.
Gone are the days of ankle-high piles of paper blanketing the floor, remnants of orders scribbled on notepads and tossed aside. In those times, ticker-tape printouts displayed stock prices and ended up on the floor.
Most orders now come online. The original ticker, installed in the mid-19th century, has been replaced with a computerized electronic ticker.
Doreen Mogavero, 53, of Mogavero, Lee & Co. started as a trader at the NYSE at 23 and remembers running from clerks to booths, taking orders from clients. Her funniest moment came when she was 25. Mogavero came flying around a corner with an order in hand and lost her balance.
Sliding on her feet across a roller rink of paper, she reached for a pole to stop her fall but missed. She slid on her rear end 10 feet across the floor, running smack into the corporate officials from the company she was trying to deliver the order to.
“I said to the CFO, ‘You see, I will do anything to get this order to the post on time,’ ” Mogavero says.
It is one of the floor’s many legendary tales.
Before the stock exchange moved to its current location, at 11 Wall St., it was housed down the block. There in the 1870s, as the story goes, a broker named James Boyd couldn’t move because he had broken his leg. He plopped himself down in the middle of the floor and committed himself to one stock: Western Union.
Other brokers, knowing Boyd was confined to one spot, began to trust him with orders to buy and sell Western Union stock as they worked on transactions in other areas of the floor. Boyd proved so successful at his task that others followed his example.
The role of the trading floor specialist -- the intermediary who brings buyers and sellers together -- was born. Brokers, who are like salespeople specializing in buying and selling securities, yell out stock prices, and specialists pick them to trade. If there are no shares to buy, specialists sell; if no one wants to buy a stock, specialists buy. They keep the market flowing. Traders buy and sell stocks on customers’ behalf.
By Wednesday afternoon, the Dow Jones industrial average is down more than 500 points -- falling back below 9,000. A tense gloom sets in over the floor.
“Holy. . . ,” one trader curses, banging the table where his keyboard sits.
“Everything all right today?” another trader shouts sarcastically.
A few minutes past 2 p.m., a floor worker from Citigroup exits the NYSE doors, walking across to the steps of the Federal Hall National Memorial. He sits in the lotus position and meditates for about 30 minutes in the middle of hundreds of tourists and Wall Street employees.
Back from a lunch break with guests from Germany, Weisberg is upset that he left the floor for so long.
“How do you think it’s going?” he says. “We’re going down 600 points?”
“It’s going to go down 700!” a specialist nearby shouts.
Others begin to yell across the room: “I’m buying on the bell!” “You want to buy a little now?”
The battery in Weisberg’s E-broker dies, and he scurries to get a new one. It’s 3:56 p.m., and the Dow is down 684 points.
Henderson trudges by, looking glum, still wearing his green jacket.
The closing bell clangs. Weisberg looks at the screen. The Dow has closed down 733 points. “People just don’t want to own stocks,” he says.
A sweeper clears the floor of granola bar wrappers, paper cups, soda cans.
Weisberg’s forehead crinkles: “We’re right back where we were Friday.”
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