  I'm here for another... 7 hours. Goddammit. I went to the New York Stock Exchange yesterday with another guy from the office. We were shown around by a broker. It's a pretty amazing place. It's just this huge room (with american flags hanging on the walls) and 1366 people in it. Actually it's one huge room and a few smaller rooms next to it. There are no chairs, and basically at the sides of the room stand people who wait by the phone to get buy and sell orders. They get a call to buy shares of whatever, and they relay it to the guy who then goes to do it. He walks to something called a "post" which is a free standing circle of computer monitors reaching a few meters high, with about 5 people inside the circle and 5 people outside.
Each person in a post trades between one and ten or so companies, so there are lots of posts dotted aruond the room. So he says to the person outside the post, I want to buy these shares, and he points to someone else nearby and says he wants to sell them, let's negotiate a price and we're done. Of course this is all very hectic and completely a waste of time. The NASDAQ does it all electronically and these guys know that they're doomed.
Every one of them that I talked to gave me a speech on why their particular function couldn't properly be repliacted by a computer and why they can still "add value to their clients". So it was interesting. People in the office are blaming me for the market being down today because I'm wearing a red shirt. 
