Word: schmuckler
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...quiet, at first, for 26-year-old Joseph Schmuckler, program trader for Kidder Peabody. The blinking number on his computer screen, which will signal him when it is time to unleash his electronic firepower, is advising him to wait. But suddenly the stock market begins to move downward, and the telltale digit on Schmuckler's screen starts changing like a countdown at Cape Canaveral. The trader and his two assistants erupt in a frenzy of shouted telephone conversations as they advise colleagues in New York City and Chicago to get ready for a blast of trading orders. "Strap on your...
...execute Kidder's preset trading program called Firedown. Triggered by a few keystrokes, Firedown zips a massive order to the New York Stock Exchange for the sale of 685,000 shares of stock in 500 different companies for a total of $31.2 million. At the same time, Schmuckler telephones an order to Chicago traders who will buy futures contracts on the stocks he is selling. The simultaneous deals, equivalent to a precomputer blizzard of paper shuffling, take just a few minutes to complete. Schmuckler is pleased. The quick transactions will bring a return several percentage points higher than the interest...
Perhaps too exhilarating, in fact. Program traders like Schmuckler have been accused of sharply accelerating the ups and downs of the stock market and making the rest of Wall Street seasick from the volatility. Computer-driven program trading began quietly enough in the early 1980s, when investment houses started employing advanced software to carry out, in a few minutes' time, complex transactions that previously took hours or days to complete. This gave investors the ability to buy or sell quickly a group of securities as if it were just one stock...
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