Dealing rooms

Abstract

Apart from the communications industry itself, it's hard to think of an area of modern business in which the pressures imposed by electronics upon management and, necessarily, spaces, are as great as in the field of dealing rooms—those chaotic information systems at the heart of the Money Market, the Foreign Exchange Market, the Stock Exchange and the Futures Market. Money markets are far from fully automated—perhaps the majority of dealers still write dealer tickets and use electromechanical keyboards—but in the Stock Exchange there's a general hope among brokers that although floor‐trading will continue for a time, the market‐place will eventually be transferred to a network of television terminals, making dealing reliant on automated systems. The current intense activity in automated dealing in the US ensures that similar developments will follow in the UK—and, indeed, the 1984 Stock Exchange Green Paper suggests that the satisfactory operation of new markets ‘will depend increasingly on its support systems’. For the facilities manager in these and in related fields, information technology, and the way in which his premises accommodate it, must be a primary concern.

Citation

(1984), "Dealing rooms", Facilities, Vol. 2 No. 12, pp. 12-15. https://doi.org/10.1108/eb018740