Image: AFP
[ed. This guy. In nearly every photo of the NY Stock Exchange and across a wide range of financial articles, you can't escape him. It finally ocurred to me to do a Google search to see if I was hallucinating, and, out to curiosity, determine if he really is a trader and not just some character actor (he is a trader). But...]The irony is that even as human traders have been de-emphasised at exchanges due to the rise of electronic trading, the need for photos of them remains stronger than ever. Every markets article on a website needs some kind of image. But these days there are only 375 trading-firm employees on the floor of the exchange, according to a spokeswoman for NYSE, which is part of Intercontinental Exchange. In the 1990s, such employees numbered in the thousands.
That lack of activity on the floor has led some news organizations to believe that all the action shots of traders are misleading. In 2014, Jeremy Olshan, editor in chief of MarketWatch, a Wall Street Journal sister website, banned photos of the NYSE floor for that reason. “The Big Board,” he explained then, “is now little more than a Big Tent for a phony media circus of photo-ops and cable-news talking heads.” The ban remains in effect today.
