Things move fast on a trading desk. There's not a lot of time to waste. Spitting out figures while taking long pulls of Red Bull and constantly abusing a stress ball, traders don't have time for niceties, like greetings, small talk, or saying the full price for something they're trading.
So they often leave off the big figure. The big figure is the part of a price that can be taken for granted. The price of something can be given in dollars and cents. As long as the dollar value stays relatively constant, traders often give just the cents.
Say crude oil is trading at $65.80 per barrel. The bids and asks that set the price (See: Bid and Asked) will likely be very close together. Say, a bid of $65.79 and an ask of $65.81. When communicating these numbers, there's not a lot of value in including the "big figure"...$65 in this case. So instead, traders might just say "79" or "81," since, on an operational basis, this is the only number that matters.
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![Finance: What is program trading?](https://media1.shmoop.com/video/thumbnails/COURSE.FINANCE.982_770x433.jpg)
Finance: What is program trading?14 Views
Finance a la shmoop what is program trading? okay well watch two episodes of
Big Bang Theory if you first watch one episode of Keeping Up with the [Man and woman watching TV]
Kardashians deal alright no different kind of program trading, program trades
in a Wall Street sense are run by a computer program, hence the catchy name
and it's also called the black box like a program kicks out that if the S&P 500
is down 0.3 percent in an hour and the US dollar has risen relative to the
pound and goog is outperforming the tech index and the moon is in the seventh
house and Jupiter is aligned with Mars then short a million shares of GE like
that would be something that the box would tell you or something like that
and there are a ton of weird mathy things behind the rationale for each of [Math formulas appear]
these trades some of it makes sense to normal people but most of it needs three
PhDs in math and physics and other stuff to translate rationally
well the dangerous thing here about program trades is that usually there is
no human involved when they execute a trade that is it's just computers
talking to other computers but thankfully computers never have glitches [Computer chip blowing off steam]
right they never have mistakes and things generally always run smoothly
when computers are involved right well this is a really smart way to manage
your retirement money just give it all to a black box and assume the guys who
wrote the algorithm knew what they were doing or maybe not [Hacker using a PC]
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