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202 Caitlin Zaloomexchange, the broker is indebted to the local trader and will give him goodtrades in the future.Brokers wield power to punish locals who are unwilling or unable to enterinto these relationships of reciprocity. They can “dump” contracts on traderswho cannot support the risk associated with large trades to test them. Thesetests can allow the local to enter into the neighborhood of a powerful brokeror exclude him from these profitable relationships, requiring him to establishnetwork connections with other traders. Each of these strategies creates a bondbetween the physical space of the pit and the social network of traders. 10Pit traders can exploit their place at the heart of the market to gain accessto information about market players that firms intentionally obscure.Knowledge of brokers’ customer trading habits can orient their own exchangestrategies. Traders often track the trading patterns of certain large institutionalplayers. It is common knowledge on the floor that certain firms work withparticular brokers in the pit. Yet, it is unusual for a broker to work solely for asingle institution. Exclusive use of one broker would give away too muchinformation to pit traders with the potential to drive the price up or down. Buttraders gossip about the patterns of the Merrill Lynch and Goldman Sachsbrokers in order to understand how the large institutional players are assessingcurrent market conditions. If Nomura is selling large lots of contracts, localtraders can understand that the Japanese firm is bringing selling pressure ontothe market. This is called “knowing what the paper is doing.” The institutionalplayers are known as “paper” because of the slips that firms use to deliver theirorders to brokers in the pit. This image of part for the whole shows how informationis understood primarily in the context of the pit. The firms are “paper”because they make their appearance in the stacks of order slips that brokershold in their pockets. The firms enter the pit as a series of paper orders.The centrality of the market and the social networks among traders createthis knowledge. It is there on the exchange floor that traders can see and hearwhat these large market players are doing and where they can solidify opinionsaround what this means in their daily gossip sessions.Time in the PitThe interplay between technology and social networks also shapes time in thepit. The pit’s design centralizes the market in time as well as in space. Tradersdescribe the market as existing at the moment of exchange. The market existsonly in the pit since this is where exchange happens. Each market is made atthe moment of agreement between buyer and seller. Once that moment haspassed, even as the two traders write up the deal, the market has moved on.The fleeting temporal nature of the market makes physical presence in the piteven more necessary. If a trader is out of the pit, he is out of the market. Any