Hystory Of Trading

By Author: Sulamita Berrezi
Total Articles: 115
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After the 1929 crash, small investors could trade off the ticker tape, which was a printout of price changes sent by telegraph, or wire. In most cases, they would do this by going down to their brokerage firm's office, sitting in a conference room, and placing orders based on the changes they saw come across the tape. Really serious traders could get a wire installed in their own office, but the costs were prohibitive for most individual investors. In any event, traders still had to place their orders through a broker rather than having direct access to the market, so they could not count on timely execution.
Another reason there was so little day trading back then is that all brokerage firms charged the same commissions until 1975. That year, the Securities and Exchange Commission ruled that this amounted to price fixing, so brokers could then compete on their commissions. Some brokerage firms, such as Charles Schwab, began to allow customers to trade stock at discount commission rates, which made active trading more profitable. (Some brokerage firms don't even charge commissions anymore, but don't worry; they get money ...
... from you in other ways.)
The system of trading off the ticker tape more or less persisted until the stock market crash of 1987. Brokerage firms and market makers were flooded with orders, so they took care of their biggest customers first and pushed the smallest trades to the bottom of the pile. After the crash, the exchanges and the Securities and Exchange Commission called for several changes that would reduce the chances of another crash and improve execution if one were to happen. One of those changes was the Small Order Entry System, often known as SOES, which gave orders of 1000 shares or less priority over larger orders.
Then, in the 1990s, Internet access became widely available, and several electronic communications networks started giving small traders direct access to price quotes and trading activities. This meant that traders could place orders on the same footing as the brokers they once had to work through. In fact, thanks to the SOES, the small traders had an advantage: They could place orders and then sell the stock to the larger firms, locking in a nice profit. Day trading looked like a pretty good way to make a living.