The Traders

by Sonny Kleinfield

An inside look at the high-stakes trading floors of major financial exchanges and the men and women who hold the chips

Sonny Kleinfield spent months with individual traders on five of America’s biggest financial exchanges. The investors he followed are the ultimate gamblers, trading only for themselves, not for clients, and sometimes going “all in” on stocks, options, and, ultimately, their own futures. These mavericks display a unique intensity and a savage brand of competitiveness. Acclaimed reporter Kleinfield gets inside their minds and worlds, showing what drives them to a stressful, high-stakes profession.

From the trading floors of the New York Stock Exchange, Chicago Board of Trade, Chicago Mercantile Exchange, Commodity Exchange Center, and American Stock Exchange, Kleinfield delivers a riveting portrait of a dying breed of go-for-broke entrepreneurs. Readers feel the frenzied excitement of the brokers and traders, and gain access to a risky, adrenaline-charged world where fortunes come and go in a single moment.

214 pages, Kindle Edition

First published August 1, 1986

About the author

Sonny Kleinfield is a reporter for the New York Times and the author of eight books. He has contributed articles to the Atlantic, Harper’s Magazine, Esquire, and Rolling Stone, and was a reporter for the Wall Street Journal before joining the Times. He shared in a Pulitzer Prize for a Times series on race in America, and has received a number of other accolades, including the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award, the Meyer Berger Award, an American Society of Newspaper Editors Award, and the Gerald Loeb Award. A native of Fair Lawn, New Jersey, he is a graduate of New York University and lives in New York City.

Reviews

[Katharine · Rating 4 out of 5]

It feels almost as fast-paced at the trading floors Kleinfield discusses. Fascinating and fun to read.

[Monzenn · Rating 5 out of 5]

A great series of vignettes about the lives of several traders. Hit the usual asset classes, though there wasn't much on rates trading which was unfortunate. Still the existing stories were good.