How Does Online Stock Trading Work?
“Hi, I’m Roger Groh. Welcome to a few minutes, on online stock trading. How does it work? Well, remember the old days, when you had to go into your stockbroker’s office, and physically sit there, and the person would enter, would write down on a sheet of paper, buy this, or sell that? They’d stick it in a pneumatic tube, and whammo, the tube would go up and around, you could hear it moving around the building, and it would go into an order room. They would put it on a teletype, the order would go to an exchange, an exchange would be made, and eventually that paper would come back, saying that you had done something, or had not. Well, that was not efficient at all, when it came to doing large amounts of volume, so computerized training in the 1980’s, really came into its own, and what it did, was to set up an electronic barter system, between buyers and sellers. Now, how can you participate? Well, your discount brokers, especially Charles Schwab, really drove the transition, to the use
