From business week Bloomberg. Any guesses who this is on elite trader? To enter the FairyTail Lounge, a one-year-old New York nightclub opened by three former commodities traders, guests pass through a sparkle-splattered door into a small room so shimmery it looks like it was painted by Tinker Bell. Above the bar, two male garden gnomes perch on an overhead shelf, frozen in ceramic ecstasy, oneâs face pressed against the otherâs glazed butt. On a dank Saturday night, the only things more dazzling than the bar itself are Roxy Brooks and Lauren Ordair, two drag queens bedecked with enough costume jewelry to sink a pirate ship. âItâs just terrible what happened to those people,â says Ordair, referring to the nearly 1,000 commodities traders whoâve lost their jobs over the last two years. âBut itâs happening everywhere. Drag wasnât my first choice, you know. I studied to be an opera singer. Turns out itâs a small field.â Now the tenor soprano belts out show tunes at FairyTail on Mondays, where one of those laid-off traders, her boss, has just arrived. âAnthony!â the drag queen suddenly chimes, Cheers-style, as she waves to the barâs proprietor, Anthony Scianna, a 50-year-old wearing a zip-up cardigan. If Sciannaâs job hadnât been made obsolete, the FairyTail Lounge might be nothing more than fantasy. Once upon a time, not so very long ago, a pauper could become a prince if he knew the right person. A reliable guy like Scianna, from a working-class family on Staten Island, didnât need an MBA, or even a college education, to make good money fast as a floor trader. Moving soft commodities such as cotton, coffee, cocoa, sugar, and frozen concentrated orange juice was an old-school apprenticeship: There was no employment office, no interview, just guys who knew guys. All a pauper needed was a loud voice, a sky-high tolerance for stress, and a friend to vouch for him. Scianna got invited to the ball and worked the business for 20 years, from 1990 until last fall, when it became clear that Cinderellaâs clock was going to strike midnight any minute. Photograph by Francesco Nazardo for Bloomberg Businessweek As recently as early 2011, 90 percent of soft-commodity options were traded on the floor in an open-outcry traditionâa loud, brash system of hand signals, shouts, and frenzied person-to-person deal- makingâgoing back roughly 142 years. But as electronic trading exploded, that percentage has flipped: About 1,000 traders used to work the floor; that number was down to 100 by Oct. 19, when IntercontinentalExchange (ICE) (ICE) closed its floor altogether and completed the transition to computerized trading. Itâs an historic shift in the way business gets done and a clear-cut case of humans being replaced by machines. As the system grows more efficient, these jobs are disappearing, and so goes a tribe of Wall Street. âI had a beautiful life. It was a beautiful experience,â Scianna says in his New York accent, the day after those layoffs left many of his old friends unemployed. âWhen I would walk into work, it felt like going home. We really were one big beautiful family.â A beautiful family from whom he hid that he was gay for 15 years, but more on that later. Leaning against a pile of purple velvet pillows, Scianna says he liked the money, the camaraderie, the Cipriani parties, and the great hours: After coffee trading closed at 1:30 p.m., the rest of his day was free. And he thrived on the stress. âIt never made me nervous, it made me excited,â he says. âOne time, I witnessed a wonderful man, the father of a dear friend, pass away in the ring, trading copper. They just pulled him out and it kept going. The market never stopped.â Scianna spent two decades trading futures but never thought much about his own. âThen we watched the business go from what it was to nothing. Suddenly the guy next to you was gone,â he says. âIn 2010 I was 48, and I said to myself, âWhoâs going to hire me? I donât have any other skills.â So I needed an idea.â The find-yourself chick flick Eat Pray Love is playing on the TV above the bar, muted, as Scianna explains that he, like Julia Roberts, began his own second act after a bad breakup. A friend told him he had to get back out there, so Scianna hit Manhattanâs gay club scene. âI noticed every single gay bar was always packed,â he says. âAll night long.â This was a growth business with a future: Bartenders, go-go dancers, and drag queens would not be replaced by machines, at least not any time soon. So Anthony pitched his idea for the FairyTail Lounge to two fellow ICE traders, Joe Carman and Dave Dwyer, who looked over the numbers and signed on as investors in the fall of 2010. Scianna immediately quit his job trading coffee for Chicago-based SMW Trading. When SMW closed down his old division three months later, Scianna was already at work renovating a space at 48th Street and 10th Avenue, with mixed results. Veteran gay club party promoter Joseph Israel, a flashy Puck on the nightlife circuit, says Sciannaâs original bar design was too, well, âugh.â So he persuaded Scianna to allow him to queer up the place. âThe bar was plain, plain, plain,â says Israel with a shiver. âThe decoration didnât even have a fairy tale theme!â So Israel conceived a wonderland of unicorns, satyrs, glitter, and a black-light poster that stars Walt Disneyâs (DIS) Prince Charming as a foot fetishist and Snow White being pleased by all seven dwarves. In a way, itâs not surprising that Sciannaâs original idea for the bar was more subdued. Heâd spent most of his adult life on conservative Wall Street, where almost everyone was straightâor acted like it. No matter how much he loved his job, he spent about the first 15 years of his career afraid that the more powerful old-timers would find out he was gay and fire him. âYou couldnât take that chance,â he says, as a slender DJ with a flat-top begins spinning house music in a tiny booth. âYou have to realize, Wall Street was a private club for very wealthy people. So I never led anybody to believe that I was gay. In those early days, I didnât want anyone to have a reason to get rid of me.â He finally came out to co-workers after Sept. 11. âI said, âThis is who I am. Iâm not going to change or come in with a dress on.â And a lot of the old-timers were gone by then, so it was OK.â Sciannaâs still working in a loud, noisy room filled almost entirely with competitive men who aggressively swap digits. Only instead of bulls and bears, itâs centaurs and unicorns. And instead of waking up at 5 a.m. to make the commute from Staten Island to Wall Street, heâs getting home from the bar around 5:30 a.m., dusted with sparkles. He has new responsibilities as a bar ownerâemployees, vendors, the glitter supplyâbut itâs working. When his friend Joanne Cassidy lost her job as a clerk in the ICE layoffs after 20 years on the floor, Scianna was able to give her work as a coat-check girl to tide her over. âThereâs a family feeling to the place,â says Cassidy. âItâs like Cheers.â Scianna says heâs definitely happier, but he sometimes misses the respect, the macho glitz, the big bonuses. âTrading, you could be an aâ âhole, you could be cocky,â he says. âYou didnât make money one day? Fâ â â you, youâd make it tomorrow. Here, I have to take care of so many people.â âI almost wish I didnât taste it,â he says of Wall Street. âItâs like the pauper who tastes what itâs like to be richâthe instant gratification of knowing exactly how much money you made every day at 2:30. Iâm all right now, but there are employees to pay, vendors, staffing issues. I donât know how much Iâve made till I pay all the bills.â Scianna is figuring it all out as he goes. Itâs getting close to midnightâalmost time for free shots!âand as the go-go boy writhes, the dance floor fills up with handsome young men and Julia Roberts shoves pasta into her face on the bar television. Scianna smiles. Maybe he hasnât found his happily ever after, but, he says, âitâs a totally whole new life. This is my second act.â Logan Hill
man floor traders seem to have such an exciting crazy life.. so attractive to me.. i need to scream degradation to people .. or get degraded and show off how much better i am then everyone.. damn i missed the boat.. haha... the pictures painted of the floor of these exchanges seem so romantically violent to me..
this is how it started for me.. born in the late seventys myself "This is out of our reach, this is out of our reach This is out of our reach and it's grown" <iframe width="420" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/2eS5EMYb5hQ" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe> and this is how it ended.. I skated Death but most of my friend didn't <iframe width="420" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/lDEituSWztQ" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe> "they paid for it with hand grenades" nice video.. i love eights music.. !
you always hear about commodities traders busting or making billions.. more bust though.. like Julia Dreyfus deep pockets as a result of her father..