Trading room

A trading room gathers traders operating on financial markets. The trading room is also often called the front office. The terms "dealing room" and "trading floor" are also used, the latter being inspired from that of an open outcry . As open outcry is gradually replaced by electronic trading, the trading room gets the only living place that is emblematic of the financial market. It is also the likeliest place within the financial institution where the most recent technologies are implemented before being disseminated in its other businesses.

Trading rooms are also known as "trading labs" or "finance labs" in universities and business schools. Trading rooms, have become a key medium in creating a "wall street atmosphere".

Before the sixties or seventies, the banks' capital market businesses were mostly split into many departments, sometimes scattered at several sites, as market segments: money market (domestic and currencies), foreign exchange, long-term financing, exchange, bond market. By gathering these teams to a single site, banks want to ease:

Trading rooms first appeared among United States bulge bracket brokers, such as Morgan Stanley, from 1971, with the creation of NASDAQ, which requires an equity trading desk on their premises, and the growth of the secondary market of federal debt products, which requires a bond trading desk.

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