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prescribed, and horrible, color of his brokerage house. It was rumpled and creased and slightly sweat stained. The sides bulged with notepads, order books, and memoranda. Twenty pens and pencils were shoved into the breast pocket.
    “You wreck your clothes,” said David.
    The traders wear dress shirts, expensive neckties, and well-tailored trousers, but most of them leave their suit coats in the members’ lounge, and their wing tips, too. They put on the gaudy sack blazers and the least-fashionable kind of lumpy sneakers. As a result, the average trader is dressed like a combination bank president, produce manager, and ghetto kid who lets his mom pick out his shoes. Nike and Tommy Hilfiger doing a NYSE line of clothes is not really a bad idea.
     
     
     
    We in the general public have an idea that there’s something WASPy or, anyway, stuffy about the stock market. But the accents belie this.
    There are WASPs on the floor, saying “fuck” with the best of them. But the traders are predominately Jewish, Italian, and, most predominately of all, Irish. The NYSE is the Brooklyn of fifty years ago. (And one reason fuck may be used so often is that immigrants didn’t understand why the slang for making love was dirtier than the slang for going to the bathroom.)
    I asked a specialist broker, who’s Irish himself, why so many stock-exchange members are micks. We’re not known for our business acumen.
    “They were cheap labor,” he said.
    The Irish were hired as clerks and runners and boys who chalked up prices before video screens were invented. They figured out how the whole thing worked, and they stayed.
    “How come there are so few black and Hispanic traders?” I asked the specialist.
    “They’re next,” he said.
    And, indeed, many of the nonbroker employees on the floor are black, Puerto Rican, Dominican, and so forth. And more than a quarter of them are women. In twenty years the traders will be saying “mo’fo,”
    “caramba,” and “oh, fudge.”
    A lot of brokers never went to college. And the rest don’t care if they did. I asked David what kind of economic theories people who trade stocks believe in. Do they belong to the “classical school,” which says the forces of supply and demand are uncontravenable and self-correcting? Are they Keynesians, who think that government programs can create prosperity and full employment? Are they monetarists, who postulate that economic cycles are tied to Federal Reserve policy?
    “I don’t think they give two shits,” said David.
    They’re tough guys. David, for instance. He’s a wiry man in his fifties, a former college wrestler. He took up running at forty and ran in half a dozen marathons with times well under five hours. When he left for the Boston Marathon, the last things to go in his suitcase were four packs of Marlboros.
    “I look forward to this job every day,” says David. He takes the subway to work from the Upper East Side and stands the whole way:
    “It never occurs to me to look for a seat.”
    “I had some marital trouble years ago,” he says. Lots of people would blame such difficulties on their work. “This job got me through some rough personal times,” says David.
    And then he is off into the trading crowd again, six strides ahead of me and holding more numbers in his head than I can count to.
     
     
     
    Upstairs from the trading floor is the New York Stock Exchange Luncheon Club, looking the way that something to do with the stock market should look. The ceilings are lofty, the windows are Palladian, and the help is obsequious. The leather armchairs are wide and deep. The china is monogrammed. The stalls in the men’s room are made of marble. And all day long the New York Stock Exchange Luncheon Club is empty. David hasn’t eaten there in seven years.
    The traders gobble take-out food, standing up, and not just because they have too much work. They’re in the groove. They’re wholly absorbed in what they’re doing. They’re