About Floor Noise

The name borrows from two places. One is the din of an open trading floor, where prices were once shouted and are now mostly spoken into headsets. The other is the noise floor that audio engineers measure beneath every recording, the level below which speech can no longer be picked out. Both belong to the subject here: what gets said when securities, currencies and commodities change hands, and what happens to those words afterward.

Floor Noise is an independent publication. It explains how voice trading desks operate, how speech recognition copes with market jargon, and why European and American regulators require so many calls to be taped and stored. It is written for people who meet that subject at work, in compliance, on a desk or in an engineering team, and for readers who simply want to know why their broker’s line beeps.

What to expect

Pages carry no author names, and no single voice is meant to be behind them. There is no advertising, no script runs in the browser, and cookies are not used. Claims about rules lean on the regulators’ own texts, cited where a page depends on them. Nothing here is investment, legal or compliance advice, and no vendor is recommended.

Anyone who spots an error can write in via the contact page.