An exodus from trading floor to screen

The Financial Times reports:

Sitting at a bank of computer screens with a telephone pressed to his ear, Stuart Pettman has his eyes glued to the myriad numbers in front of him, while some of his colleagues are kicking a soft football between their desks.

The scene may be typical of many trading rooms around lunchtime in the City of London, but for Mr Pettman and his colleagues, it represents a transformation of their working lives.

A year ago, Mr Pettman, and more like him, used to stand around in colourful jackets, shouting, waving their arms and flicking their fingers in a large room near the Tower of London. They were oil traders buying and selling Brent oil futures contracts, the benchmark for European oil prices, on the floor of the International Petroleum Exchange, now called ICE Futures.

Since then, they have joined a growing band of futures and equity traders working from electronic trading arcades, where, unattached to any large financial institution, they can rent a desk and a screen and start trading in a financial market of their choice. Such arcades are springing up in diverse locations, from London to Marbella, India, Sydney and Chicago.

They can be anywhere with a modem and a computer.Any big city relying on financial trading jobs, better question whether those jobs will be around much longer.Big cities were,historically,a central meeting place for commerce.With the broadband revolution, what's the big city's function? Parking a car would have to be free to compete with the hinterlands.