Having mastered roughly some of the mysteries and technicalities of the
Stock Exchange, we are now able to follow a broker through an average
day of his life with some interest. The broker's office-boy sighs
wearily to himself when he hears clerks in other walks of life dilating
upon the easy hours enjoyed by the Stock Exchange and its employees. It
is true that the office-boy does not have to reach his sphere of labour
early enough to sweep out the place and dust the desks; that is all done
for him; but he is supposed to be on the spot by about half-past nine.
Until ten he is pretty well lord of the office, for the Stock Exchange
clerks, as a rule, have a very easy time as regards hours. They need
rarely get to town much before ten o'clock, except the youngest of the
juniors, and the first personage of importance to arrive is he upon whom
falls the duty of glancing through the correspondence. Of course, it all
depends upon the size of the office, just as it does in other
businesses, how this branch of work is organised. In the case of a big
firm the letters are carefully sorted, and each department has its
proportion handed over, one dealing with transfers, another with
dividends, and so forth. But a smaller office may be more representative
of the general run of Stock Exchange work, and in such a one the
correspondence comes into the scope of the chief clerk if the partners
are not energetic enough to deal with it themselves.
By half-past ten the work of the day is mapped out, the bargains of the
previous day are in the checking book all ready for the unauthorised
clerk to check, the transfers are being prepared for delivery or
registration, the transfer receipts are run through to see what
certificates are ready for collection, and a multitude of details get
put into train for attention. At twenty minutes to eleven the
unauthorised clerk, who has probably been reading the newspaper,
declares that he will be shut out of the Settling Room and flies away to
check his bargains, while the partners begin to arrive on the scene.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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