Sort of Sad, But Inevitable I Guess
CBE is closing its open outcry pits (e.g. the type of trading portrayed in the movie Trading Places). Time to short the manufacturers of brightly covered jackets (from my very very limited experience observing the pit in Chicago, one unreality of Trading Places is that the traders are all wearing fairly normal business attire).
epobirs:
As noted in 'Humans Need Not Apply,' the trading pits have long existed just for appearances on TV.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU
February 5, 2015, 11:27 amlelnet:
Your experience generalizes. You can spot one a block away...they're the only clean-shaven, recently-showered people who dress like that.
February 5, 2015, 1:12 pmMole1:
"...in the movie Trading Places."
Dude, you're old...
February 5, 2015, 2:09 pmmesaeconoguy:
It's CME (Chicago Mercantile Exchange), coyote, but they now are all located at the CBOT building on LaSalle, having vacated the old CME towers at Wacker & Monroe (where I worked) after the merger.
Your observation about Trading Places attire is correct – nobody wore “business attire” in the pits, because it is too uncomfortable. Standing, running and shouting for any extended duration is not conducive to that wardrobe.
Yellow jackets are the clerks and runners, and the colored jackets are the traders, with some jacket colors denoting the trading or clearing member firm.
February 5, 2015, 4:07 pmAnn_In_Illinois:
I walk past LaSalle and Jackson on the way from Union Station to my office, so I sometimes see those jackets up close (because people who wear them are going for lunch or something). The jackets look pretty cheap - I can't imagine that the manufacturers make huge profits from them, since it looks as though whoever buys them shops purely based on price.
By the way, that's where I also saw the Occupy Chicago people for nearly a year, I think, before they finally gave up. They had one corner in Chicago where they were in front of the Bank of America building and across from both the Chicago Federal Reserve and the Board of Trade. They had big black signs with tiny white lettering that was hard to read, and that said ridiculous things like "Bankers are mass murderers because their lifestyle is killing all of us."
February 6, 2015, 11:42 amobloodyhell:
...Beats the alternative, ya punk...
:-D
February 7, 2015, 11:57 amobloodyhell:
Neo-luddite trash. The current limit on all machines is "common sense". This is an essential aspect of decisionmaking. We cannot begin to actually even DEFINE this concept, much less duplicate it in a machine. And even small children can figure this out -- tell a child that the cat has fleas, and you want to get rid of the fleas. Unless the child is sociopathic, the child is smart enough NOT to make the reasoning -- "Heat kills fleas. Throw the cat into the furnace." This is the simplest form of common sense.
Yet you cannot -- CANNOT -- know the machine will not make this choice.
"Civilization advances by increasing the number of important things you can do without thinking about them."
For every decision we reduce to the point where a machine can do it, we free up human minds to do more. Period.
February 8, 2015, 12:00 am