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are and currently sell for more than $1 million apiece.
    Possessors of these seats do no sitting. A stockbroker may conduct millions of dollars of business in a day, but instead of a corner office with a Statue of Liberty view, he has an eighteen-inch space filled with phones, computer screens, and the infinite pieces of paper that attach themselves to anything involving money. And he can’t even get near this because a couple of clerks are in it taking orders to buy and sell.
    There are various kinds of brokers on the stock exchange. The floor broker works for a brokerage house. When you get a tip from your acupuncturist that Disney is going to buy Seagram and open a Scotch-and-Water Park in Boca Raton, the floor broker is the person who buys you your shares. He is your actual stockbroker. (And he will be a he. Only 169 seats on the Exchange are held by women.) The person you call your stockbroker is a salesman who doesn’t even sell stock, or buy it, either. He just sells you on buying and selling. The brokerage house makes money on the commissions, no matter which you do.
    Besides floor brokers, there are competitive traders who are independent businessmen buying and selling for their own accounts, specialist brokers who deal only in certain stocks, and two-dollar brokers who handle excess business for floor traders and can buy and sell for any brokerage.
    Two-dollar brokers are so-called because they used to get a two-dollar commission for every 100 shares of stock they traded. The commissions are now negotiated, but “what-the-fuck-is-this-costing-me brokers” takes too long to say. And that is how it would be said. One of the old-fashioned charms of the NYSE, besides the littering, is the constant use of fuck as a noun, verb, adverb, and adjective with every possible meaning except “sexual intercourse.”
    Around the walls of the NYSE trading rooms are the tiny workstations grandiosely called “telephone booths”—more than 1,200 of them. In the middle of the rooms are the horseshoe-shaped counters with banks of video screens overhead, the “trading posts.” Here the hollering middle-aged men gather, looking like they’re doing something foolish. This is what we see on television.
    The middle-aged men are there because of the specialist brokers. Each specialist has a location at a trading post, and every stock that’s listed on the NYSE is assigned to one specialist. If a floor broker wants to buy or sell a certain stock, he has to go to the specialist’s post.
    The broker who goes to a post is called the “trading crowd” even if he’s the only person in it. Although usually he isn’t, because the cattle-herd instinct is as strong on Wall Street as it is, for example, in a cattle herd. The specialist’s job is to give a “quotation” on the stock—to tell the trading crowd the highest price that anybody is currently willing to pay for a share and the lowest price at which anybody is willing to dump it. The video screens above the trader’s head show the last price at which a stock was traded and whether that price was an “uptick,” a “downtick,” or no tick at all. The stock “ticker” running around the room is a compilation of the trading prices from all the specialists’ posts.
    What’s going on in the trading crowd is a double-jointed, Hydra-hatted auction—as though Sotheby’s had a dozen guys with gavels, each with the same Rembrandt, and not only could the bidders raise their prices but the auctioneers could lower theirs.
    It sounds complicated because you and I don’t buy a lot of Rembrandts at Sotheby’s. But shopping for a car this way would be a pleasure. You want a Lexus. You know exactly how much the last Lexus sold for—with the same option package you intend to get. All the Lexus dealers in the world are in one place. You can hear their lowest prices. You don’t have to read their fibbing newspaper ads or spend all day traveling to their dealerships in the outer