Traders begin as bank apprentices and must leave dealing by their early thirties

Evidence

With one exception, all traders, chief traders, and salespeople observed and interviewed were male, and all but one analyst was male; of all these, their ages ranged from 20 to 45 years. Retired chief traders’ ages ranged from 55 to 85 years. The typical trading career consisted of starting as a bank apprentice and getting drawn into trading-floor activities between the ages of 19 and 25 years, in response to personal inclinations or needs arising in the bank. In contrast, all analysts and some salespeople held university degrees. On the floor, traders are trained on the job, starting as juniors, who act as assistants to experienced traders; if successful, they move on to senior trading positions. No trader was older than 33 years of age. Typical career patterns for aging traders consisted of going into sales, proprietary trading (speculative trading for the bank’s account), or asset management, or moving on to management positions or leaving the market. — Karin Knorr Cetina & Urs Bruegger, Global Microstructures, 59

Categorization

• XREF: Echoes the age-boundedness of trading careers that appears in other finance ethnographies like Karen Ho’s work on Wall Street institutional lifecycles. — connects to: Currency traders were apprenticed young men with no university degrees — Karin Knorr Cetina & Urs Bruegger, Global Microstructures: The Virtual…, 59

Related

• Currency traders were apprenticed young men with no university degrees (similarity 0.94)