The Ring, LME

Gimme the ring, kissed and toll'd,
Gimme something that I missed.

Filming again. The film crew are truly lovely folk, but Lordy it is intense and Lordy Lordy Lordy I am already so busy with day-job things.

Gimme the Ring
This is the London Metal Exchange trading floor, known as The Ring. It's been called that since the seventeenth century, when the metal traders would arrive at a London coffee house and draw a chalk circle on the floor: if you wanted to trade, you had to get in the ring.

Now, firmly into the twenty first century, the LME Ring is the last major financial-trading venue in London where open-outcry auction markets still operate in an old-school face-to-face "pit". All other markets are screen-based. And nowadays, where there's screens there's 'bots; and where there's bots us people are just too darn slow. We're made of the wrong stuff, and the future of trading belongs to machines.

We filmed here early this morning before the traders arrived, and then we came back later to catch the heat of the closing auctions before the lunch-break.

It reminded me of nine years ago when I was working for Deutsche Bank, on their London FX floor. I'd forgotten how much I had missed the shouting and the urgency. And the people: I like traders a lot; they're my kind of folk. Something that I missed.