Traders stand in the "pit" on the floor of the 1930 Art Deco Board of Trade building. The pit was surrounded by a stair-step riser where traders could leave orders to be picked up by runners and delivered to the clerks at desks along the side of the floor. The room had a wall-length chalk board that was used to track prices and sales.
The photograph on the right of the runner was taken sometime near the turn of the century.

larger, brighter trading floors filled with expanses of multicolored monitors and hundreds of traders and runners. Over time, Chicagoans established four major member-owned exchanges, including the Chicago Stock Exchange, the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, called the Merc, and the Chicago Board Options Exchange. But the Board of Trade remains the most active exchange in the world with a record 281.2 million contracts traded in 1998.

The kinds of products traded have changed over time, too. These days, pork bellies and oats make up only a fraction of the business of the exchanges. In fact, Treasury bond futures are the most active product at the Board of Trade. More than 110 million such contracts were traded last year by independent traders, pension funds and other institutional investors to guard against changes in U.S. interest rates.

Meanwhile, agricultural commodities make up less than 5 percent of the trading business over at the Mercantile Exchange. The Merc's big product is the Eurodollar, which banks, large corporations and investment funds use to hedge against possible losses due to movement in short-term interest rates. Floorwide, the Mere traded a record 226.6 million contracts last year.

In the last three decades, the Chicago