....a broom stick on "The Floor"

If you ask me to rate the top 3 important days in my life, I would rate today April the 16th, 2008 as one among them. (The other 2 are probably my wedding day and my graduation day, but am still figuring out the order of importance :-). Hopefully by the end of my life I'll have the order sorted out)

So what the hell did I do today? No ..I did not do lunch with Pope.

I entered this old white building with pillars in the front , flashed my ID, walked couple of dark narrow aisles where people of historic importance, presidents of many countries, CEOs of many multi million dollar companies have walked before. (Infact today the president of Republic of South Korea walked out of that building a few minutes before I walked in. No, he wasn't lucky to meet me). After walking through those dark narrow aisles they opened to a tumultuous floor. Guess where I am? It’s the Mecca of Brokerage Industry - The New York Stock Exchange's trading floor (The NYSE, fondly pronounced as 'Naisee') . Hey how easy was it to get there? Isn't cool? You thought its like getting into a mall or a grocery shop or something.

Believe me, this place is the epicenter of the financial universe. Vigintillions of dollars are moved through this floor and I wont be able to put a value for the amount of money traded since it was established.(For those who are scratching their heads to know what Vignitillion is, it’s 10 ^ 63 only). I was told that this exchange was started 216 years back. Yeah you read that number right and there is no typo. Two centuries have passed by and life still goes on.

I was taken for a tour of the entire floor by a gentleman who represent our company in the floor as a floor broker (Let me fondly call this character as Mr. Donald Duck). He has been doing floor trading for 35 years and he knows every screw of the floor. Let me try and give a quick textual tour of what I experienced today. The first thing he showed us was an LED panel full of numbers and letters which everyone on the floor will be constantly looking at. These are nothing but indices. He specifically showed us the Dow Jones index and how it kept changing each second. Along with that there we other indices, current Gold price, Oil price etc. One wouldn't realize how these numbers are important, but they directly reflect the economy of U.S.A at a macro level and to some extent reflects and drives the economies to most of the countries in the world. To me and to many others it was just a 5 digit number.

An interesting criticality of looking at those number standing inside the floor is that these are live figures which the rest of the world gets to know after 20 mins. Yeah - outside that building, everyone gets to see the quote with a 20 minute delay. No wonder they banned cell phone inside the floor. If I had one I can make few millions within 20 mins or make some a millionaire within few mins by giving critical information before the rest of the world gets to know. The proud fact for me is that we brought some luck with us to the exchange. Dow was not doing well for a while and was down most of the week and when we were there, we saw it shooting skywards. The market's open & close points for today is Open: 12371.51 / Close: 12670.56 / Change : +256.80 / Volume 279.74 Million shares. I'll definitely remember these numbers and will tell everyone that I was there in NYSE when Dow went up 256 points

There were about 1300 brokers in a small floor with so many TV scrolling random numbers which god knows what that means. So many cameras, wires, press people, laptops etc were all over the place. This one is definitely the highlight of the day. As Mr. Duck was guiding us through the floor, Fox news was giving a live update to its news channel and we were standing right behind the press person showing our teeth and we were on TV for 5 seconds.:-). Not bad isn't. I felt as if am reporting live from NYSE floor to Fox news. Am trying hard to get a video clip from Fox news website. It was weird and funny to see TV anchor's doing make up in the middle of a highly business centric environment and the floor brokers found time to pass a whistle or two amidst their work.

We then visited our company's booth, which I was imagining a big cubicle-type office. Holy shit, it was literally a 2 feet by 2 feet area with couple of systems, communication lines, an order printer and a whole lot of other things required to do their work with no chairs to sit. If they get time to sit, then they are literally out of business and we all whine about our chairs, cubicles and dustbin.

Then Mr. Duck went on to show the place where the NYSE's famous bell is. I've seen that in TV when CEOs of companies ring them when their stock gets listed. It gives an illusion that the bell podium is present as high as pope's podium in St. Petersburg in Vatican. In reality its just a small and disordered place which gets it fame for few seconds when the market opens. All the exterior glass windows were bullet proof. There was a huge titanium mesh surrounding the entire building. I was told that any rockets or moving objects targeted towards the building will be detonated outside the building due to these meshes. When I asked Mr. Duck whether aircrafts will also be detonated outside, he humorously said "We haven't tested that yet" :-). Mr.Duck even showed us the phone which directly connects to Mr.President in the White House. In the event of any mishaps, one can reach him and say "Hey Wazzup buddy". Mr.Duck is such a seasoned bloke on the floor that he din't forget to show us an old broom which is used to clean the trading floors. There were other funny instances which as a micro stake holder of the industry I can't share it to public. You go inside and figure it out yourself :-).

As we were doing a tour, remember the business cannot stop for a milli second and so Mr. Duck was executing trades and demonstrating his work with his handled instrument which runs on Microsoft windows (it hung up couple of times and as usual he reboot it and everything was OK. As a 60 year old veteran he accepted that things do work when restarted)

After almost two hours of excitement, we reached the inevitable exit of the floor. Time to say bye to Mr. Duck, who I thought was very committed and ethical to his work with a pinch of humour. These 2 hours definitely go down as time well spent and a life time experience for me. At minimum I have another 1 GB of text to write about my visit, but I have to end this.

As I continue to boast about my visit to the NYSE trading floor, there were 5 other work friends of mine who came with me (Rags,Jazz, Vasu, Shant & Praz). They are going to boast about today in the same capacity as I did, may be little more. They saw the bell & the broom too, they were on fox news too and it’s a lifetime experience for them too.

Although am so proud of this day, its definitely not something that I deserve because of my hardwork or achievement. There were many people behind this who made this happen and I should thank a few of them (JH,JB,LV,MA,JK,NR) who made this happen to me. They have lots of hope on us and they made us feel so excited and gave this wonderful opportunity. We will definitely return them the favour and make each one of them feel equally excited one day.

Am going to make a call to my dad, mom & my wife and bore them with my visit story, but at the end of the call my wife's going to ask me if I bought any dresses for her in NYSE. After my futile attempts to explain that it’s a trading floor for shares and not dresses, am going to admit that I did indeed buy few dresses from 'Naisee'. Now I'll have to go to Macy's this weekend.

When I narrate this experience to many of my friends and relatives, they are going to brush it aside and say "You visited NYSE. So what?"….. But as I said, to me its one of the top 3 important days in my life.