pretty interesting tidbid:
the pit language and structure is highly specific and has developed built in redundancy to prevent misunderstandings.
the word "for" typically only represents bids or purchases and the word "at" typically represents offers or sales.
so you can sell AT price X, but you don't sell FOR price X (some people say it wrong, but old timers tend to hate it).
typically to represent an offer you'd say "i'm [price] offered" or "i'm at [price]", but to represent a bid you'd say "i'm [price] bid"
you'll notice he says "i'm offered AT [price]", but you wouldn't say you're bid "for" [price], you'd say "i'm [price] bid"
additionally in transactions, you'd say:
sell [quantity] at [price]
pay [price] on [quantity]
inverting the structure gives another sanity check when people are checking trades verbally.
and those guys have insanely good memory, because they make these trades by word of mouth then card it (write up a paper slip) after the fact. when its busy, you can be carding trades up well after the fact and many trades later.
and when you indicate prices with your fingers, palms in for bids or purchases, and palms out for sales or offers.
yes, people still do that by holding up the number of fingers of the price they want. yes, its archaic.
but frankly, the electronic markets tend to do really poorly in these situations. its hard to get a "real" 2-sided market in panics and all the liquidity is relly in the pits.
he's just giving the play by play on the price basically.
a "handle" is the whole number value, so when he says "down 65 handles" S&P futures are trading 65.00 points under the closing price from yesterday.
in the pit they generally refer to just the unit place and the decimal value:
"5 evens" = xxx5.00, "seven halves" are xxx7.50, "seventy evens" == xx70.00 (in this case it was 1070.00 in the SP 500 future price).
when he says "figure bid at oh five" at the end, figure refers to a hundreds handle, (in this case it was 1100), so the two sided market was 1100.00@1100.05.
I'm shocked that he's saying its the craziest he's ever seen because it was like that in about the same duration about 2 years ago. one morning S&P's printed down 80 handles or so in a few minutes and came all the way back up just like yesterday.
Crazy, in this sense, perhaps equates more with 'irrational' than 'erratic'. In 08' Everyone basically knew why things were melting down (or had a narrative that fit the data) but people were pretty much dumbfounded at the massive move with little or no immediate cause.
