Look Sharp/Trade Tight
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As Silence Falls on Chicago Trading Pits, a Working-Class Portal Also Closes
The pits where generations of sweating traders in colorful jackets once bellowed out orders for wheat, corn and cattle contracts, using hand signals and sheer force of personality, are almost empty. The smattering of traders who hung around them on a recent day appeared listless, some glancing at tablet screens, others staring blankly into space. Open-outcry futures trading, a profession that took root here in the mid-19th century, becoming part of the city’s identity and influencing trading systems around the world, is going extinct. Most of the futures pits inside the Chicago Board of Trade building, an Art Deco ... (full story)