The stock market might be hard to predict during these unsteady times, but there’s one thing that’s certain: You’ll see plenty of photos of unnamed stock brokers on the floors of exchanges around the world looking pretty upset as the market collapses around them.
The style and composition of these photos rarely changes. The traders are usually shot from above, and the more of them in the photo, the better. Getting a ticker sign in the background, preferably with red numbers or down arrows, is good too.
The brokers are rarely identified in these photos, they are simply a visual representation of “Oh crap, the bottom is falling out of the market!” The photos are all the same, and yet each one has its own personality. Thankfully, two people have captured the absurdity of these photos with their blog, Sad Guys on Trading Floors.
Chris Riebschlager and Jess Hemerly launched the site on Oct. 7, a day when the Dow dropped 508 points. The genesis for the site was simple. “I made an off-hand remark on Twitter that it was a bad time for the economy but a banner year for photographers who specialize in sad trader photos,” Riebschlager said in an interview with P+P. “Jess saw this, we started talking about it and decided it’d be funny to start a site based on all these photos. The time between joking about making the site and actually having the site running was a matter of minutes.” (Not quite the same conversation Regis and Kelly had about the market, also on Oct. 7.)
The site has now received over a million hits, and with another extended downturn in the markets possible (though they did respond positively to Barack Obama’s pick of Timothy Geithner as treasury secretary), and plenty more photos of sad traders coming, I asked Riebschlager about the site.
How do you find the pictures you use? They’re a good mix of “traditional” trading floor photos, with kookier ones included, too.
They’re not hard to find at all. Every news story about the economic crisis (and there have been plenty lately) always have an accompanying photo of a sad trader. It’s just a matter of taking a quick stroll through the news sites.
I have come across some odd photos. I have a feeling that the photographers working on the NYSE floor get tired of the typical trader facepalm. When something weird happens, like Gene Simmons shows up or a clown rings the opening bell, they pounce on that.
Newspapers wouldn’t run at least half of the pictures you have on your site—it’s almost like your pictures have too much personality. One of my observations is any story about the stock market dropping has to be illustrated by specific type of photo—group of brokers looking up at board, with a pained look on their faces. Why do you think this is?
A photo of a sad trader is probably the easiest way to illustrate the financial crisis. When the market falls, these people are the first to experience it. The market is such an abstract thing that sometimes the best way to photograph it is to capture the facial expressions of the people right in the middle of it.
The captions are great. What type of commentary do you think you’re making about stock brokers, or about the stock market in general?
I’ve been a huge fan of Mystery Science Theater 3000 since I was a kid, so making jokes out of serious things has become a permanent fixture of my personality. Jess and I have the same sense of humor so early on we were just trying to crack each other up with the captions. We’re not trying to make some relevant commentary on the crisis and we’re absolutely not attempting to insult the people who appear in the photos. We’re just trying to crack ourselves up and hopefully make some other people laugh.
Do your captions personalize people who are rarely identified? Do they become something more than just a sad face?
I have a very minimal understanding of how a trading floor works, but it seems ridiculous to me that this kind of business is handled by frazzled men and women shouting at each other in a big room. So all the photos taken on the trading floor automatically have a certain amount of ridiculousness built in. Every caption we write is just trying to get a laugh out of that ridiculousness.
You work for an ad agency in Kansas City in new media/interactive advertising, pretty far from the world of Wall Street. Does this make it easier for you write for your site?
I think that l could do this site no matter where I lived. If you’re watching the news, no matter where you are, you are painfully aware of what’s happening on Wall Street. I would guess that’s a large part of why the site received so much attention, we’re poking fun at a phenomenon that a lot of people were already familiar with.
Other people have commented on the “sad brokers” phenomenon (It’s not clear if they are following Riebschlager and Hemerly’s lead, or noticed the pictures independently.) Hemerly found a dubiously funny sketch comedy duo that wrote a song about the common broker habit of “facepalming” while watching bad news on the trading floor. And a blog similar to Sad Guys on Trading Floors, Brokers with Hands on Their Faces, also launched in October, though it hasn’t been updated in two weeks.
With the way the economy is performing now, it’s unlikely there’ll be a blog called Smiling Brokers Can Sleep Well at Night Again. But as depressed (and depressing) as the markets may be, their performance, and the brokers’ reactions, will give Riebschlager and Hemerly plenty more material.
