All the stuff I'd need to trade. As a day trader, you can work at a home computer in your pajamas. For more camaraderie, you can plant yourself in one of the big rooms the firms fill with brand-new computers. There you can schmooze with other guys who, like you, are their own bosses, betting their life's savings on a big score. In the trading rooms, the urge to snare Wall Street's trillions is overt.
Traders shout challenges to the firms whose names they see on their screens.
Frequently, for example, traders loudly advise Goldman Sachs, one of the biggest and baddest of the old-line trading firms, to come to Papa. Or to some part of Papa's anatomy. These days, when pieces of any publicly traded company can be bought or sold with a click, when buying ten thousand shares of eBay takes less work than playing Sonic the Hedgehog, making scads of money seems easy, too. Hull is not a day-trading firm, but, like the day traders, Hull tries to make money by predicting how stocks will move over very short periods. Unlike the day traders, Hull is a big, highly professional, well-capitalized firm that happens to be consistently right.