FLASH FRIDAY is a weekly content series looking at the past, present and future of capital markets trading and technology. FLASH FRIDAY is sponsored by Instinet, a Nomura company.
WBR’s Equity Leaders Summit took place in Miami this week, and one theme of the event was how trading venues are innovating to provide liquidity. As per usual, some panel participants of a certain age recalled the days when liquidity was sourced by picking up the phone and calling brokers.
Perhaps the high point of high touch trading was reached when UBS built a trading floor a few decades ago. Not just any trading floor — a trading floor for a record number of human traders and landline phones. Like, as big as a football field.
As the Kansas City Chiefs and San Francisco 49ers prepare to do battle in Super Bowl LVIII next Sunday, what better time to revisit possibly the most well-known connection ever made between trading and the gridiron?
UBS’ former trading floor in Stamford, Connecticut, was built in the 1990s. It fell on hard times in the global financial crisis of 2008-2009, and the bank sold the property in 2017. In this era of electronic trading, it’s safe to say the floor’s listing in the Guinness Book of World Records will never be challenged.
“There are 1,400 traders occupying the space sitting alongside 5,000 computers,” Guinness reported in 2002. “The trading floor is almost the size of the flight deck of the USS John F. Kennedy, the world’s largest aircraft carrier, or 20.5 basketball courts or 44 singles tennis courts.”
But of course, the trading floor was most universally described as being football-field sized, or more accurately, the size of two football fields. That’s well more yardage than Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes can cover in a deep pass, if Tyreek Hill were still on the team.
To illustrate the ubiquity of the descriptor, even today, a Google search of “trading floor football field” – four fairly generic words – spits out articles about the UBS floor as the top two results, and 11 of the top 14.
The story of the UBS trading floor is well-chronicled. But what is the space today?
Well obviously a giant space like that isn’t going to become a florist or a coffee shop or a neighborhood bistro. Amid its change of ownership, it was possibly going to be a laser tag arena, a roller derby arena, an ice-skating rink or a film stage.
The end result isn’t as fun as any of those: 677 Washington Boulevard in Stamford, Connecticut is now an office tower.
“A former international banking headquarters with the world’s largest trading floor has undergone a major transformation,” the office tower’s website says. “Originally, this 12 acre complex opened in 1998 to serve as the North American headquarters of the international bank UBS. After a major repositioning, tenants can now take advantage of its best-in-class infrastructure, including…+13 foot ceiling heights, and floor-to-ceiling windows with views of Long Island Sound.”
The building houses a lobby bar and cafe, conference and lounge spaces, a conference center, a yoga studio, a fitness center, a food hall, and an outdoor terrace, among other amenities.
It all sounds nice, and modern – very 2024. And if the walls could talk, surely there would be some good tales of high-touch trades, gone both right and wrong.
