The Curmudgeon - HUMOR
By Brad Zigler

(NEW YORK)-Yet another specialist left the floor of the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) last week, leaving only relative newcomer Flibinite Specialists to deal with the three remaining Big Board floor brokers. The NYSE has dealt its landmark property in a three-way real estate-for-stock swap with Trump Properties and Rick's Caberet International that could radically change the Wall Street milieu. Within months, the NYSE's trading hall is set to be transformed into Manhattan's largest adult-themed arcade and disco, with Trump as landlord.

"This place's a ghost town," said Flibinite market maker Spencer James, as he swept the floor after the close Monday.

NYSE jettisoned its custodial staff a month ago in the winding up of its floor business. "The exchange told us 'You wanna make a market? Then keep it clean.' Only now do I realize what they really meant," James added.

Wall Street's headlong push into less costly "upstairs" (or electronic) trading, coupled with the almost giddy proliferation of exchange-traded funds (ETFs), has created a "perfect storm" that enveloped an admittedly unwary operation like Flibinite's.

"We opened the post thinking we'd run a book and make a few bucks before we rolled into hedge fund operations," said James, as he polished faucets in the men's washroom. "Boy, talk about bad timing!"

There were wholesale closures of other firms' floor operations in the days following Flibinite's market-making debut. Some firms simply moved upstairs. Others were forced out of their specialist roles because they couldn't maintain orderly markets.

"Everybody remembers how the snowball started rolling in 2007," recalls Terrance Utley, a surviving and bedraggled, "two-dollar" broker. Firms like Utley's once populated the NYSE, executing trades for brokerages without floor representatives.

"Those damned Claymore MACROshares. You know, the 'up' and 'down' oil ETFs. They were the trigger," Utley declaimed. "Hoo boy, the imbalances in the order flow put the specialist in some deep doo-doo, I'll tell you. They weren't ready to make markets that complicated. I went to school with some of them. The head of the shop had trouble sorting his lunch money. How in hell can he be expected to run that algorithm?"

After that, as hundreds of esoteric ETFs poured into the market, more untested specialists tried to parse the inefficient from the unfathomable. The short run of many ETFs launched in the months following the MACROshares meltdown, in fact, is traced to specialist ineptitude, according to many market pundits.

"Clearly the index owners didn't take seed money from the right specialist," notes Charles "Cuchy" Sahabian, head of proprietary trading at Avatar Capital. "As far as I know, Stephen Hawking wasn't bidding."

As more and more books failed to balance, specialist representation in the ETF market grew highly concentrated.

"In the first wave, we had to take on twice or triple the number of ETFs we expected to handle," recounts Flibinite's Spencer James. "Then, as one specialist after another dove for the exits, we took on still more. The chaos in the openings became unbelievable. I haven't slept in months. I'm more nervous than a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs."

Some market observers say the tumult in the ETF market was inevitable and predicted. "The investment fund industry issued warnings long ago," says recently appointed Investment Company Institute chairman Bob Barker. "Now these 'elegantly carved shotguns' have blown a hole in a lot of feet. I wouldn't trust my 'Price Is Right' retirement money to any of them."

Other experts claim the fault lies in the quantity and not the quality of ETFs, saying the SEC greenlights too many funds.

"A little more moderation would be good," observes new Wall Street squire Donald Trump. "Of course, my life hasn't exactly been one of moderation."