Black-Scholes price sheets faced mocking resistance from traders on the CBOE floor.

Evidence

More attractive was to print theoretical prices on sheets of paper that could be carried on the floor, often tightly wound cylindrically with only immediately relevant parts visible. Particularly widely used was a subscription service of Black-Scholes price sheets that Fischer Black began in 1975. Trading with the help of sheets was, however, initially not universally well regarded on the CBOE. Chicago was a “macho environment” where fellow traders “would laugh at you and try to intimidate you out of the pit, saying, ‘You’re not a man if you’re using those theoretical value sheets.’ They’d take your sheets and throw them down on the floor and say, ‘Be a man. Trade like a man… . You shouldn’t be here. You’re not a trader. You can’t trade without those’” (Hull interview). — Donald MacKenzie & Yuval Millo, Constructing a Market, Performing Theory, 115

Categorization

• CANDY: The macho image of traders throwing theoretical-value sheets to the floor and calling sheet-users unmanly is a vivid, self-contained anecdote.
• ADDENDUM: Connects to the performativity thesis: the paper instruments (price sheets) were how theory materialized into the trading pit, and faced cultural resistance before becoming standard.
• XREF: connects to: Early options traders ridiculed spreadsheet users as unmanly and untraderlike. — Donald MacKenzie, An Engine, Not a Camera: How Financial…, 722

Related

• Early options traders ridiculed spreadsheet users as unmanly and untraderlike. (similarity 0.88)
• The Black-Scholes model entered trading floors via paper sheets, not computers (similarity 0.81)

Broader Connections

• Early options traders ridiculed spreadsheet users as unmanly and untraderlike. #expands (0.95) — Donald MacKenzie, An Engine, Not a Camera, 722