Trading Arcades

Has anybody worked in a Trading Arcade or Prop Shop? If so, can you tell us about it?

I thought that this article was interesting:

New skills for an old game

The declining importance of brawn in futures trading

FOR Scott Okamura, electronic trading seems a godsend. A slight 41-year-old, Mr Okamura says that he never did well in his 18 years as a floor trader at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME). In the trading pits, towering ex-athletes with booming voices had an edge. Now the playing field looks a lot more level.

As the futures industry shifts from open-outcry towards screen trading, big, burly men with sharp elbows are out. Twenty-somethings with cool heads and quick fingers (often trained on video games) are in. So are some flexible veterans like Mr Okamura. Rather than trade sitting alone in an office or at home in their pyjamas, a growing number are choosing to work in electronic trading “arcades” or “prop shops” (trading firms that pay them a salary and a slice of profits) offering computers, real-time news streams and the company of other traders, even if they are competitors.

The early arcades were grim places. Now, as demand for skilled screen traders heats up, some prop shops are splashing out on plush digs to lure and retain talent: fancy technology—up to seven screens per trader—in the trading room; and lounges with plasma televisions, video games, pool tables and food outside it. “We want them to be stimulated” even when they're not trading, says Mary McDonnell, president of Geneva Trading, a prop shop with about 100 traders in Chicago and Dublin.

Former floor traders are learning new tricks too. At the CME's Globex Learning Centre, a simulated trading environment, more than 200 people a week come to hone their on-screen skills—including Mr Okamura, before he joined an arcade this month. They range from current exchange members to members' employees (many floor clerks have been fired) and, increasingly, individuals from arcades and prop shops. The centre offers a “Trader DNA” program to help track individual trading behaviour. “This is a completely different way of trading that has to be learned from scratch,” says David Norman, whose firm created Trader DNA. Traders can no longer rely on the roar of the pit to help them follow others' order flow; now the game is about technical analysis, macroeconomics and reading volume on the screen.

The change has been rough for some successful floor traders. “You're going from being a big fish in the pond to a nobody,” says Ms McDonnell. “It's ego-crushing,” she notes, especially for men. Although Geneva hires mostly young employees—it is known for favouring video gamers—it recently started a new training track for ex-floor traders. The veterans' reactions may be slower, says Ms McDonnell, but the youngsters cannot match their experience. “You get some of these kids looking at key past events in the markets, and realise they were three years old at the time.”

I tried to find out some more info about the trading dna program mentioned in this article and put it in this thread:
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