- Peter Tuckman has been with the New York Stock Exchange for nearly 38 years and is the most photographed trader on Wall Street.
- Stocks plunged last week on concerns of contagion from the Silicon Valley Bank collapse.
- “I’ve never seen volatility like what we’re seeing here. It’s intraday madness,” said Tuchman.
On the morning of the biggest bank meltdown since 2008, Peter Tuckman drank four espressos and two orange juices to get ready for the day.
Stocks fell immediately that morning. The S&P 500 had its worst week of the year. Shortly after the opening bell, the market was in chaos.
Stockbroker Tuchman, who has nearly 38 years of experience on the trading floor, The most photographed trader on Wall Street, And he’s seen his share of volatility.
He survived the stock market crash of 1987, the dot-com bubble burst, the financial crisis of 2008 and the COVID-19 crash of 2020.
“The shit really hit the fans,” he told an insider when Silicon Valley Bank collapsed on March 10.
Tuchman described the New York Stock Exchange as “the delta of all information” and the “ultimate pricing mechanism” of global markets, and that Friday investors and news outlets put their pulse to the test. I called him more often than usual to check on him.
Hedge funds, large institutions, wealthy retail investors, and “game-obsessed” clients reached out to Tuchman and other brokers on the floor and asked: are we? ” He said. “We are the eyes and ears of listed companies.”
“In a world of liquidity and volatility, it is important that decisions are made by humans at the point of execution, not machines, robots, or algos,” he said.
Panic rattled Wall Street, stocks plummeted on concerns about what might come next under the weight of the Federal Reserve’s interest rate rise, and there was also contagion from the SVB. The worst disaster since the last financial crisis.
Bank stocks led a sharp decline on Friday, recording their worst week since 2020. The market decline was accelerated by fears hitting SVB peers such as Western Alliance Bancorp and Signature Bank, both of which fell more than 20% on the day.Like SVB, Signature was taken over by his FDIC over the weekend. increase.
“I’ve never seen volatility like what we’re seeing here. It’s intraday madness,” Tuchman said of financial markets in recent years. “What happened for generations now happens between lunch and coffee breaks, right? We could be in a bear market at 11am, we could be in a bull market by 3. there is.”
He added:
Tuchman didn’t eat lunch on Friday, but he doesn’t usually.
Tuchman said “shit really hit the fans” when Silicon Valley Bank collapsed last week.
Reuters
On the floor, Tuchman felt “something serious was going on” when multiple stocks stopped trading at once. This is a pricing mechanism called “Limit Up, Limit Down” that temporarily mitigates abnormal volatility when price declines in individual securities reach levels that could exhaust market liquidity. is done for
In Tuchman’s words, “If a stock goes up 30 points and goes down 40 points, no one benefits, so give everyone a chance to figure out what they want to do. It’s not reasonable.”
He added:
Less than a minute after trading opened at 9:30 am on Friday, another SVB peer, First Republic Bank, stopped trading for six minutes. The stock paused 12 more times that day. Western Alliance followed suit, saying it paused 20 times during the day. historical data From the New York Stock Exchange.
“We trade a lot of infectious stocks, so suddenly [we] aware that the market is selling [them] Fundamentally off,” he added.
Monitors cover almost every corner of the trading floor. The fast-talking broker leans over the screen, picks up the phone, and digests a series of headlines to analyze what’s driving the market.
“We are surrounded by all the information that makes up the market. Pointed at a hundred monitors. “You see everything in real time.”
Tuchman says there’s always volatility somewhere, but that’s part of the job.
As traders left for the weekend, there was a sense that more trouble was brewing. The government did not announce that it would boost the losses of SVB and Signature Bank depositors until Sunday evening, leaving investors anxious about what would happen next.
“Markets don’t like the unknown and uncertainty,” he said. “We didn’t know much more than we did. It’s a time of uncertainty in the market and that’s why there was a massive sell-off on Friday.”
He added: We are out of the pandemic.We have a massive rate hike environment.The tech sector is on fire.We have retail sales here.All eyes are on the market.
