Trading mumbo-jumbo fading away

Banter between traders becoming a thing of the past as markets embrace digital age

London (Reuters) “The Old Lady just bought half a yard of cable and there are plenty of bids for Bill and Ben.”

Confused? To most foreign exchange traders in London’s financial district that sentence would make perfect sense: “The Bank of England just bought half a billion US dollars worth of British pounds against the dollar and there’s interest to buy the Japanese yen.”

The mixture of Cockney rhyming slang, market banter and expressions picked up from horse racing bookmakers may sound like nonsense to most people, but has dominated the $4 trillion-a-day foreign exchange (FX) market for decades up until recently. Most often used for currencies, countries and numbers, this f inancial market mumbo jumbo is starting to die out on the modern trading floors of international banks. The growth of electronic dealing over computer screens

rather than telephones or in person, a new generation of university-educated traders, and the introduction of the single European currency, are all seen as reasons behind slang’s demise.

“These terms get batted around a little bit but not as much as they used to,” said Graham Davidson, director of FX trading at National Australia Bank in London, who said dealing rooms in general are much quieter than they used to be.

“FX is much more electronic. Lots of the slang came about through banter with the voice brokers, but that doesn’t really work with machines. A lot of day-to-day chit chat has faded away, it’s quite sad.”