NEW YORK, MILLAT+(APP/AFP) – It’s the end of an era
and another sign of digital dominance: Friday is the final day screaming, gesturing traders can buy and sell commodities, including oil, on a trading floor in New York.
The death knell for “open outcry” trading in New York came in April
when the CME Group announced it planned to close the physical trading floor at the end of 2016, saying volumes for the old-fashioned method represented just 0.3 percent of overall energy and metals trading.
“I can confirm that all open outcry options on futures trading pits
in New York will be closed, as planned, at the end of trading today,” a spokesman for the Chicago Mercantile Exchange said Friday.
In truth, US markets have long been transitioning to electronic
trading and the CME’s announcement was hardly news to many in the industry.
“The closing of the New York trading pits is largely a formality,
which surprises the trading community, not for finally closing, but for still existing on the eve of 2017,” former pit trader Ryan Carlson said in an email message to AFP.
Carlson, who transitioned to electronic trading in 2005, has
published a book to document the hundreds of hand signals used to communicate in the noisy chaotic trading pits. He professes “nostalgia” for an era that is quickly fading.
“Ever since I began as a clerk on the trading floor at the Kansas
City Board of Trade in 1998, the inevitable closure of exchange floors was always thought to be imminent but like the scrappy occupants of the trading pits, means of survival were continually discovered,” he said.
Floor trading for commodities in New York already was diminished when
the CME in February 2015 announced it would cease futures trading on the floor.
That move still allowed for the trading of options on West Texas
Intermediate, the US oil benchmark, and leading metals contracts. But that too will end after Friday.