All Intensive Purposes

An invisible fist in a silicon glove?

. . . When [the International Petroleum Exchange] announced that it would close one of London's last open-outcry floors on April 7 2005 and transfer trading to the screen, self-employed oil traders were in revolt, even taking the extraordinary step of going on strike for a day -- an ineffectual move that hurt their pocketbooks and did little to upset the daily flow of oil trades.

"I didn't want to change," says Mr Pettman. "Like a lot of people I don't like change . . . but when change is forced upon you, then you have to adapt," he says . . . .

Other traders worried that they would fail to adapt to an office environment after spending most of their working lives immersed in the distinctive culture of the world's second largest energy futures exchange.

"It was a rock'n'roll lifestyle - the money, the drinking," says one former trader who did not want to be named.

The adjustment from floor to screen has also brought other lifestyle changes. "Traders are working harder now then they ever did on the floor," says Mr Pettman. "There is one who used to come onto the floor three days a week for a couple of hours, now he is in the office from 7 in the morning to 7 at night," he says.

The heightened atmosphere of the trading pit made patterns of buying and selling more predictable, so that traders could almost pick and choose the times they wanted to work. Many feared that the move to screens would wipe out their advantage.

"The one thing you don't get [on screen] is the noise. [On the floor] you could hear the sound of the market changing - people would be screaming 'buy, buy, buy', and then all of a sudden it would change to 'sell, sell, sell'," says Mr Pettman.

Yet for some, he adds, trading via the screen has become addictive, with traders reluctant to leave their screens in case they miss an opportunity.

Kevin Morrison, "An exodus from floor to screen," Financial Times 7 (April 7, 2006).