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 If you’re a trader or investor, you'll closely identify with and enjoy this unadulterated, colorful, straightforward story about the professional floor trader and what it is really like on the floor and in the pits of the nation’s major financial exchanges.
After months of reading and reviewing technical books on options, charts, technical studies and the like, I wanted to indulge in some light, enjoyable reading. This book was just the ticket.
The author, Sonny Kleinfield, a reporter for the New York Times, spent several months with individual traders on the floors of two major stock (NYSE / ASE) and three major futures exchanges (CEC, CBOT, CME) to get the background material to write this book.
He tells us that the book is the result of his longstanding curiosity about professional floor traders, whom he describes as “…a class of people who don’t like to take orders. They don’t like sitting at desks…have exceedingly high opinions of themselves and they like to dream big dreams…Money is their fix and rush…men apart, financial daredevils who are…the last individualists in America.”
Relatively uninitiated in the terminology and background of trading in stocks, options, commodities and currencies prior to writing this book, Kleinfield has done a masterful job of describing the excitement and stress and giving the insider’s view of the professional trader.
He makes the reader feel as if he or she is actually participating in the action on the New York Stock Exchange floor, the soybean pit, the Mesa options post and the currency markets. After-hours action takes place at Harry’s Restaurant, a colorful hangout for traders after the close, where they unwind and share war stories.
The traders share their views with you throughout the book. Here are a few of their comments. Of the CBOT soybean pit: “It’s like Animal House. Every day I put on my trading jacket and go in there, I have no idea what’s going to happen. Some days in there I’ve been petrified, others I’ve been exhilarated.”
Another: “The bottom line is, what else would I do? Am I going to sell vacuum cleaners and hope I make some good deals and earn $30,000? I mean, what’s the big deal? I can go down into that pit and make that in one day.”
A young runner: “If you ask me, these guys are all nuts.” Warren Schwartz, a New York CEC futures trader: “I’ll trade anything. I’ll trade orange juice, lime juice, prune juice. I’ll trade inner tubes. I’ll trade sand. I’ll trade air. I’ll trade Melba toast. I know zilch about these things, but I’ll trade them.”
I was gratified to learn that the traders in the book are real people (and names), not fictitious. I recognized one name as that of one of my own long-time book customers. And, in a conversation with my friend Peter Steidlmayer, I mentioned that I was reading and reviewing the book, and that one of the traders was from the CBOT’s soybeans pit (where Steidlmayer himself spent more than 20 years).
Peter immediately recognized the figure in the book as Chuck Wafer (the “Ice Man”), an old trading buddy of his. (Incidentally, Chuck Wafer is interviewed in depth in When Supertraders Meet Kryptonite by Art Collins, a collection of 35 interviews with highly successful traders dealing with periods in their trading career when they encountered a period of severe adversity, how they dealt with it and what they learned from it. This is also a fascinating, entertaining and worthwhile book.)
The Traders is fascinating, and I highly recommend it as an enjoyable and informative reading experience for all levels of traders and investors with an interest in all markets (stocks, options, commodities and currencies).
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