Blackboard Trading

The OG way of trading stocks.

Before automated quote boards started dominating the stock exchange scene in 1969 (the same year the U.S. went to the moon, so...the technology was there), we had “blackboard trading.” Traders would hand-write bids and offers on big blackboards, waiting for a matching price to execute the trade.

Remember, the world wide web, aka the internet, wasn’t even invented until 1990, about 30 years later. We had to start somewhere.