ABSTRACT

Trading environments are the places and environments of trade. To illustrate, once Chicago’s commodity exchange moved indoors in the 1870s, traders conducted their sometimes wild and frenzied business in the trading pits of the new Chicago Stock Exchange. There they were surrounded by support workers supplied by telegraph and later by telephone with notices of qualities, quantities, terms, prices, and delivery dates. Like its sister institution in New York, the Exchange was graced by symbols of bounteous harvests, honest toil, resource wealth, and human ingenuity (Figure 1.1). 1 The trading that occurred in these pits was distanced from the environments where timber was felled, iron and copper ore were mined, hogs were raised, or wheat and corn were harvested but was made possible by the communications infrastructure supplying letters, telegrams, newspapers, and telephone calls that linked them together. The Chicago Stock Exchange was a heavily coded place and therefore a classic example of an environment for trade, but even there trading was never completely separated from nature. This was exemplified by the reactions among brokers to news of hail or snow damage to crops in distant Nebraska. It was signified by the bear or bull, icons of the trading activities in these pits, and by the sculpture of Ceres, goddess of the harvest, that the traders passed each day. The traders understood many environments albeit through the distorted and rescaled lenses of their own calculative and imaginative practices. As they conducted their business, the markets that they framed and performed shaped the environments that were being conformed to the markets. Thus, to paraphrase economic geographers Christian Berndt and Marc Boeckler, their ‘model of the world became the world of the model,’ and their ‘commercial knowledge of the environment became the environment of their commerce.’ 2 But the wheat futures market, the prices and quantities traded, and the market’s ‘performance’ remained outcomes of a complex trading environment. <bold>Facade of the New York Stock Exchange, 11 Wall Street, New York, USA.</bold> Opened in 1903, the Exchange building features in its pediment sculptured figures designed by John Quincy Adams Ward. Entitled “Integrity Protecting the Works of Man” the group has ‘Agriculture' and ‘Mining’ to one side of the winged figure of ‘Integrity’ and ‘Science,’ ‘Industry’ and ‘Innovation’ on the other. https://s3-euw1-ap-pe-df-pch-content-public-p.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/9781315678580/7815a167-7382-4db2-8fc8-97421d9482f7/content/fig1_1_C.jpg" xmlns:xlink="https://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"/> Source: Gordon M. Winder, 2012.