Documentary shows Chicago trading-pit glamour dimming

Doug Pringle saw punches thrown, blood spilled and fortunes lost during his 17-year career at the Chicago Board of Trade. He misses it, every day.

"The biting of the nose and the fights, sure, when you're throwing around that kind of money, people tend to lose it sometimes," said Pringle, 42, who traded corn, soybeans, 10- year Treasury notes and 30-year bonds. "I miss the excitement."

Chicago's open-outcry nostalgists can now watch their slow-motion obituary on film. "Floored," a documentary that premieres in the city tonight, captures the fading swagger of its exchange pits as electronic trading takes over.

Traders and former traders in the film recount drug-fueled road trips with prostitutes, living in mansions, and a crash that included divorce and having to take a $400-a-week job.

The numbers in Chicago's pits peaked in 1997, with about 10,000 traders flailing their arms with buy and sell signals in a daily scrum of sweating and shouting, said Steve Prosniewski, a trader who's one of the film's producers. Less than 10 percent of those remain, he said.

"You were jammed like sardines, but alive and kicking," said Prosniewski, 43. "Sometimes you'd drop all your trading cards and your pen on the floor, and you'd leave them there till the end of the day because you'd get crushed trying to bend over and get them."

Chris Felix left the floor several years ago after electronic trading became more common and open outcry started dying out. Felix said he still misses trading, and after watching the documentary on an advance DVD, he had a hard time sleeping.

"I was so wound up, I couldn't sleep for five hours," said Felix, 37, who went on to start the Web site healthgizmo.com. "It was more like a flashback. I don't miss the floor I left, but I miss the way it was."

CME Group Inc. allowed the filmmakers to shoot inside the Chicago Mercantile Exchange in 2007 and the CBOT in 2008. This month, it refused to let the film's director return to the trading floor to be interviewed. Allan Schoenberg, a CME spokesman, declined to comment.

James Allen Smith, the director, declined to speculate on why CME officials are no longer cooperating. Felix said he thinks it's because "Floored" shows some "unfortunate realities of the business."

"The exchange, because it's a multinational corporation, wants a marketing piece and to grow the business," Felix said. "It isn't in the CME Group's best interest to address" certain questions.

Another producer, Joe Gibbons, is also a trader and appears in the film. In an interview at the Gene Siskel Film Center, where "Floored" will be shown tonight, Gibbons recalled the mix of competition and camaraderie that marked life in the pits.

"They'd rip your heart out," said Gibbons, 49, who traded from 1985 to 2004 in the stock-index futures pits and now trades electronically. "Afterwards, the guy who just ripped your heart would go, 'Can you give me a ride home?'"

"Floored" documents the shift from open outcry to the electronic trading that has drained the pits of thousands of traders in the past decade. The CME doesn't track the decline in how many people work on the floor, said Mary Haffenberg, a spokeswoman.

Many pit traders took pride in the fact that they could make more money than the guy next to them who had a business degree, Gibbons said. The electronic-trading firms are filled with engineers and computer scientists who anonymously trade with the click of a mouse, not off fear in the eyes of traders in the pits, he said.

Making the switch could be difficult for people who have spent their entire careers trading on the floor, said Wesley Harr, 30, who trades on his own behalf.

"For a lot of these guys, the transition from the pit to the computer screen is really a difficult hurdle to overcome," Harr said by telephone from Philadelphia. "I was raised with a computer, so it's not a big leap for me, but people who grew up doing it that way may have a harder time."

Michael Krueger, an equity derivatives trader at Timber Hill LLC in Greenwich, Connecticut, still misses the 10 years he spent on the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange.

"It was the greatest job you can hope to have," said Krueger, who earned an advanced degree in computer science after leaving the pits. "I knew all types at the exchange who clawed and spit and bit their way to the top."

Smith, the director, made the movie to show future generations a disappearing world.

"I hope it can be sort of a time capsule," he said. "People have been predicting the end of the floor for 20-plus years. I wanted to say 'Let's look at this before it's gone.'"