Flat screens: New tool of the trader

A major investment bank might plunk down $200,000 or more to equip and maintain a single trading desk for a year. Next to that, a few hundred dollars for a video monitor seems like chicken feed.

A major investment bank might plunk down $200,000 or more to equip and maintain a single trading desk for a year. Next to that, a few hundred dollars for a video monitor seems like chicken feed.

By John Wagley
December 2001
Institutional Investor Magazine

In fact, those screens are a big concern because traders’ efficiency and productivity depend on clear views into their markets. Catering to traders’ preferences and keeping pace with the continual upgrading of computing power at their workstations, financial firms are starting to trade up to the next generation of video technology as well.

Bulky cathode-ray tube, or CRT, screens, are rapidly giving way to liquid crystal displays, or LCDs, also known as flat panels because they are no more than a few inches deep. If nothing else, they are a boon to space planning. “Across a dealing room with thousands of screens, when you’re on Wall Street and paying $50 a square foot, the difference between 4 and 1.5 square feet per 21-inch monitor adds up,” notes Kevin Kenety, chief executive officer of Actant, a Zug, Switzerland-based trading technology company.

But LCDs are gaining a following for other reasons, including superior screen clarity that allows for more intricate graphics and enables traders to deal in more issues or instruments across different markets. “People can access and visualize a lot more information more quickly and efficiently than with CRTs,” says Alex Slawsby, a technology analyst at research firm International Data Corp. in Framingham, Massachusetts.

LCDs generate less glare and are easier on the eyes than CRTs, thus offering an ergonomic edge; after all, a more comfortable trader is generally a better producer. “Trading is stressful enough, so anything you can do to help your body feel better over a 12-hour day will help you with your decisions,” says LCD aficionado John Moore, president of eFloorTrade, an institutional brokerage based in Orlando, Florida.

LCDs also generate less heat, which, particularly on a huge trading floor, can lower air-conditioning costs substantially, states Charles McLaughlin, president of Menlo Park, California-based McLaughlin Consulting Group. He adds that flat screens are also cool in a more figurative way: “They may be a status symbol, especially for executives who hold meetings in their offices.”

The flat screen technology popular in home entertainment centers now appears rudimentary next to new professional systems from suppliers like IBM Corp., NEC-Mitsubishi Electronics Dispaly of America and Sharp Corp. Sharp, for example, developed a monitor that delivers a clear picture even to someone standing at a 170-degree angle to it. In other words, three traders sitting next to each other can see the same image with the same clarity - a nice perk when the three are conferring on a price quote or mulling the movements of several different securities.

But the equipment is expensive - high-end models cost $1,000 or more. And even though prices at the low end have fallen below $400, that’s still twice what a CRT monitor costs.

So it is understandable that flat panels are far from universal. San Jose, California-based research firm Stanford Resources-iSuppli Corp. says that only about one in ten desktop screens worldwide are LCD-based. But with demand rising and costs falling, market penetration should approach 50 percent by mid-decade.

Count the financial industry among the early adopters - others include the engineering, architectural and medical communities - that are taking the latest that the manufacturers have to offer. Analysts say it is only a matter of time before these systems go mainstream in offices and even homes.

The distinctions between CRTs and LDCs are not all, well, black and white. IDC’s Slawsby says that with the right graphics programs, CRTs can show charts that equal or exceed LCD quality. But the more complex the job, the more pixels - the minuscule dots that define image density - are desired. There are 180,000 pixels on an 18-inch CRT screen and 1.3 million on an LCD screen of comparable size. IBM is selling a 22-inch display with 9.2 million pixels for $22,000 - pricey, but a fraction of the take on one profitable trade.

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