See: Trader.
Where the action happens if you're a trader in the financial markets. It's like the sports book to a gambler, or a blood drive van for a vampire.
Trading desks provide a place for the actual buying and selling of financial instruments to take place. They plug into the exchanges, facilitating and executing trades.
They can cover any market; equities are probably the most famous, but there are trading desks for fixed income, currencies, commodities, and futures as well.
Related or Semi-related Video
Finance: What is the Fast Market Rule?11 Views
Finance a la shmoop what is the fast market rule? okay things get crazy here [Two guys riding a rollercoaster]
whoa and every now and then there's a leap well blimey, that's how things work
here on the London Stock Exchange.....
the fast market rule accommodates the chaos by giving brokers and other market
makers the freedom to trade outside the ranges published to the exchange why is
this needed? well because we live in a world of robots and artificial
intelligence and fat thumbs that hit the wrong keys and hackers from Russia China
and Mars all of whom can profit from chaotic disruption if you want to see
this phenomenon in its finest form well check out Jack Nicholson in the original [Man stood next to Jack Nicholson as Joker]
Batman movie and that was the best one so the logic revolves around the fact
that today even with all our massive computing power we would still rather
rely on human beings when you know the congressman hits the fan then assume
that a computer will be clever enough to figure out what's wrong quickly you know
when the world is on a collision course with chaos all over the place fast [Meteor strikes Earth]
market rule, humans over robots...
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What are position trading and swing trading? Get your mind out of the gutter. They're way more boring than they sound.