// THE FLOOR
The Pit
An open outcry trading floor, in 3D. A card goes up, the floor asks you for a market, and you quote both sides out loud before anyone tells you which way they want to trade. Then they trade, and you carry the position.
How a round goes
- 01A card goes up on the board - an estimation, a dice or deck question, a stock. You are told what settles it, not what it is worth.
- 02The floor asks for your market. You give a bid, an ask and a size: forty bid at forty-two, ten up. Quote too wide and nobody trades with you; too tight and the person who knows more takes the good side.
- 03Someone hits or lifts you. Now you are long or short, and the next quote has to account for the position you already have rather than starting clean.
- 04The card settles. Your PnL is the difference between what you paid and what it turned out to be worth, and your floor rating moves with it.
Why it is worth practising out loud
Every trading firm that runs a market-making round runs it as a conversation. You will be asked for a market on something nobody can look up, traded against two or three times, and asked after each one where your market is now. Candidates who have only read about spreads freeze at the point where they have to say a number and then defend it.
The Pit is the rehearsal for that. Nothing here is a real firm’s question - every card is generated - and the point is not the arithmetic. It is saying a price, being taken up on it, and having an answer ready for what you do next.
You can say it rather than type it. Press Mic and quote out loud the way you would on a floor; the browser turns it into text on your machine and nothing about the audio leaves it. Press Voice and the floor reads the tape back to you. Both are optional, both are off until you press them, and typing is never the lesser path.
Common questions
- What is open outcry?
- The way exchanges traded before screens: traders stood in a pit and shouted bids and offers at each other, using hand signals when it got too loud to hear. The Pit recreates that as practice for the round of a trading interview where you are asked to make a market out loud.
- What does making a market mean?
- Quoting two prices at once - the bid you will buy at and the ask you will sell at - without knowing which side the other person wants. The gap between them is your spread, and it is the only thing protecting you from whoever knows more than you do.
- How do I say a quote?
- The way a trader would: "forty bid at forty-two, ten up" means you will buy at 40, sell at 42, in ten lots either way. Type it or say it. The floor takes the side that suits it.
- Can I say my market out loud?
- Yes. Press Mic and speak it - "forty bid at forty-two, ten up" - and it goes in as though you had typed it. Your browser asks permission the first time and the microphone opens only while you are pressing; nothing listens in the background. Typing works throughout and is never the lesser path.
- Do I have to give microphone permission?
- No. Decline it and the Mic button switches off and stays off - it does not ask again - and the game plays exactly as before by typing. The permission prompt is your browser's, not ours, and we never see or store any audio: speech is turned into text by the browser itself.
- Does the floor talk back?
- Press Voice and the tape is read aloud - what the floor says to you, not your own quote echoed back. It is off until you turn it on, and it stays however you left it.
- It says my browser has no mic. Why?
- Speech recognition is not in every browser. Chrome, Edge and Safari have it; Firefox does not ship it at all. Where it is missing the button says so rather than failing silently, and typing is unaffected.