Needless to say, only Jesse Livermore could have "operated" in oil during this sketchy period.
The first brokerage job I had was a Series 7 Registered Rep April 1982.
Dean Witter Reynolds, they had 40 floors in World Trade Center II.
I worked in a retail office in Ridgewood, NJ.
High net worth area. Two express trains/day to the Hoboken "tubes".
In that retail office we had a large ticker tape on the wall over the glass back office ("the cage").
When the ticker tape was running, it sounded like a large toy freight train.
Back then the NYSE was 10:00am to 4:00pm.
Then moved to 9:30am.
There were chairs in the back for customers to watch the tape, smoke cigars.
I never looked at it, have no idea how to "read a tape"
No internet in 1980's.
Times change.
***
There is an entire industry known as "data vendors".
Started with the big companies:
Dow Jones, S&P, etc. gathering data.
Then third parties got in the act: Interactive Data (I think that is FT now).
Muller Data, Reuters, Bloomberg, etc.
The data vendors gather "consolidated tapes" (mainframe) to sell.
Now its just a data feed.
The initial challenge was there was no indexing system.
The answer to that problem was the
CUSIP system.
Wiki says 1960s. I say more like 1981-1982 implemented.
Committee on Uniform Information and Pricing.
Proprietary to S&P.
That's why data is spotty for most securities pre-1981-1982.
