Back then Wall Street was a very different place compared to the present day in terms of technology. At that time most of the trading on Wall Street was done manually by human traders and there were very few electronic trading platforms. Of course traders were trading for stockholders who are interested in making as much money as they could. That hasn’t changed probably since the dawn of time.

The were phones. They were the primary means of communication on Wall Street. Traders would call one another to place orders, negotiate prices, and discuss market conditions.

Ticker tape was a machine that printed out the latest stock and bond prices as they were reported by the exchanges. This allowed traders to stay up to date on market movements in real-time.

There was Quotron, an early electronic system that provided traders with real-time stock quotes, news, and other financial data. It was one of the first electronic trading systems to be widely adopted on the Street.

There was Telex, a telecommunications network that allowed traders to send and receive messages between financial institutions around the world.

I filmed this video using Betacam SP content. At the time the trading floor seemed a bit nutty . I didn’t understand what was going on and it was gobbledygook to me.

Looked at today, it still is very confusing and I suspect that some of my subscribers will see this as essentially unchanged from what it was back then and others will see what computers and digitization etc. have done to radically alter Wall Street stock trading.

Viewers have asked me about my Wall Street experiences. From time to time when I have had extra money, I have invested in the stock market and every time, without exception, at the end of the day, I lost the money. If I had invested in my own filmmaking or in any of my hobbies such as collecting photographs, I would have done so much better. It seems to me, my own personal experience, that the only people that end up profiting by stock and bond trading are the traders and the companies they work for. And it is amazing when I study it how many people are drawn to this video when searching words like investing, personal finance, retirement, credit scores, debt management, wealth management, crypto, taxation, financial planning, and entrepreneurship.

Looking back trading on Wall Street in 1979 relied heavily on manual processes and human interaction. It was not until the 1980s and 1990s that electronic trading platforms began to gain widespread adoption, ultimately leading to the highly automated and computerized trading systems that exist today.

Search the words “Wall Street” on my YouTube channel and you will find more clips from New York’s Wall Street and others. To support my efforts to present more videos like this one, please click the Super Thanks button below the video screen.
Thank you
David Hoffman filmmaker