What do all of those people running around and shouting in the NYSE do?

casey_leftwich: What do all of those people running around and shouting in the NYSE do?
I see it on TV all the time. Hundreds of them, all in color coordinated jackets. They’re all shouting stuff, flashing numbers on their fingers, pointing, and running around. What exactly are they doing?
Who are they employed by?

Answers and Views:

Answer by fordman
Buying and selling stocks for people.

Answer by Jake S
They are responsible for stock transactions.

The key player in the NYSE is the specialist – a market professional who works for a specialist firm that is responsible for making a market in a particular stock.

The specialist’s role is that of an auctioneer.

They are responsible for maintaining order in the market for a stock and posting the best buy and sell orders first.

However, it’s not quite that simple. If the orders become unbalanced, the specialist must try to get the market back into order even if it means buying or selling against the market out of the company’s own account to achieve some balance to the buy and sell orders.

The specialist doesn’t set stock prices anymore than any other auctioneer does. Their role is to match the best prices possible for the stock.

However, the specialist can adjust the opening price of a stock if there is a large book of orders before the opening bell in the morning. The specialist can also halt trading if necessary in extreme circumstances of order imbalance.

For the most part, the specialist role remains that of matching buyers and sellers at the best price for both.

Even though the specialist is a real person, a sophisticated trading network handles most of what happens. No human can keep up with trading volumes measured in the hundreds of millions of shares each day that pass through the NYSE.

The specialist makes money by pocketing the spread – the difference between the bid and ask price on market orders. They can also trade for their own firm’s account and others.

The specialist on the NYSE is responsible for matching the best prices for a particular stock. This auction method assures investors they can buy and sell at the best price available at that particular moment.

Answer by oracle
A duck has got inside the building — they are trying to catch it.

Answer by OPM
The person above is correct on the specialist but that leaves out the other roles. There are two others actually. They are both brokers, but one can be thought of as a customer’s broker and the other as a broker’s broker. They are trying to get their customers’ orders filled at the best possible price. To give you an idea, if you were to buy 100 shares of ATT today (symbol T) you are actually instructing one of those people to go to the floor and work on your behalf to get the best available price. Since everyone there is competing for exactly the same thing, they are all yelling and waiving hand signals to be seen by the auctioneer. A customer’s broker is working for the end customers. Sometimes, it makes sense for brokers to place their orders with other brokers such as to cover “odd lots,” where the order is irregular and can be aggregated with other orders more efficiently.