This is a paraphrase of a semi-well-known quote from a respected business professor named Warren Bennis, about the "factory of the future" - who knows whether he coined it or adapted it from a common joke though. Here's his version of the quote, which I like a bit more:

The factory of the future will have only two employees, a man and a dog. The man will be there to feed the dog. The dog will be there to keep the man from touching the equipment.

The NYSE floor traders are only there for window dressing to be seen by the TV cameras. They are entirely redundant and watch movies for much of the day when there is no need to show a flurry of activity after opening or before closing. The entire building is no longer of any real importance.

Most of those floor traders is running a small business (2/3 guys/girls) based on past contacts and trader know-how (such as it is - some better, some worse.) It's really more of a 'bazaar' for small, likely well connected, trading firms rather than anything else. It has been 'hard' for them in recent years as order flow has moved to the largest, too-big-to-fail brokers (GS, JMP etc). But certainly the NYSE gets a lot out of the media coverage, but the brokers themselves are not owned by the NYSE.

I think the joke was that the man is there to feed the dog, and the dog is there to keep the human from touching the computer.

But on the flip side, most physical trading floors are closed. Can't see the last few lasting much longer.

> Can't see the last few lasting much longer.

I believe the remaining ones are effectively TV studios for business channels, so they have a completely different purpose now.

There are several floors that have "real" action. A couple of the options pits that are truly specialist and the CBOE VIX pits for instance come to mind.

But I don't think anyone believes those have more than a couple of years left in them.

yeah, i really don't know what these guys are talking about. the business day to day has been massively revamped by automation. there are hft ops that are blasting millions and millions of orders a second and probably account for 70%+ of all trading volume.

I think you have cash equity in mind. This is a very small subset of what investment banks trade.

i trade financial futures and cash equity. i realize ibanks offer leveraged bets on all kinds of nonsense to provide a "service", but pretty much any strategy known to humanity can be achieved on an exchange with negligible counterparty risk

Being centrally cleared to reduce counterparty risk and being traded electronically on an exchange are two distinct things.

Electronic trading does change dramatically the shape and profile of a trading floor. Introducing central clearing with margining not so much.

You won't achieve electronic trading anytime soon on products where there are perhaps at most 200-300 buyers in the world, must of who are only interested in buying big chunks.