Trading In The Old World

The other day we were musing about life before COVID. Specifically, what the Trading and FinTech community was all about. Like the former floor traders describe, it was more of a comradery, where most of the players were brothers and sisters.

In that same spirit, I revisited this photo, taken in February of 2020. On this night our chapter of Chartered market Technicians and traders spent the evening with Billy Assimos, legendary owner and manager of Ceres Cafe in the Board of Trade Building.

Billy worked at his father's restaurant within blocks of the Board, and soon found himself trading. Then his restaurant entered the building and the rest is history. His best story is trading DOW futures and cleaning up during the 1987 crash. And then there were the great floor traders of lore that would stop in for lunch. In those days the wall facing the hall of the Board of Trade flipped to produce a giant bar facing the hall.

COVID seemed to serve as the trigger for the forces that were already mounting to change the trading industry forever. Automation, corporatization of capital, hyperconverged computing power, and machine learning have forever changed trading into FinTech.

Many of those changes are good, and most were inevitable. But after COVID, the human turnover seems much greater. individual traders and smaller market firms have become scarce.

Trading itself is a bygone term of the old world. The world before 2020. With the computer replacing the trader, the relationships and comradery has sadly taken a backseat. Our famous Chicago Trader's Meetup no longer meets. Seldom does our CMT chapter.