A trading jacket is a

blazer A blazer is a jacket worn as part of a smart casual or business casual look. Similar to a sport jacket, a blazer is not part of a formal suit, and the terms "sport coat" and "blazer" may be used interchangeably in daily life. A nautical bl ...

garment worn by a broker who executes trades by

open outcry Open outcry is a method of communication between professionals on a stock exchange or futures exchange, typically on a trading floor. It involves shouting and the use of Hand signaling (stock market), hand signals to transfer information pri ...

in and around the trading pits of various financial exchanges. Throughout the twentieth century, trading jackets were simply white. Following

counterculture of the 1960s The counterculture of the 1960s was an anti-establishment cultural phenomenon and political movement that developed in the Western world during the mid-20th century. It began in the early 1960s, and continued through the early 1970s. It is ofte ...

, they became brightly colored and distinctive to assist in the identification of specific traders or the exchange members for whom they work. In the United States, American flags became a common accoutrement following the

September 11 attacks The September 11 attacks, also known as 9/11, were four coordinated Islamist terrorist suicide attacks by al-Qaeda against the United States in 2001. Nineteen terrorists hijacked four commercial airliners, crashing the first two into ...

. Today, trading jackets are mostly

anachronistic An anachronism (from the Greek , 'against' and , 'time') is a chronological inconsistency in some arrangement, especially a juxtaposition of people, events, objects, language terms and customs from different time periods. The most common typ ...

as open outcry exchanges have been displaced by

electronic trading platform In finance, an electronic trading platform, also known as an online trading platform, is a computer software program that can be used to place orders for financial products over a network with a financial intermediary. Various financial products ...

s. Chicago-based PECO Inc has been the leading supplier of trading jackets since 1919.

Nick Leeson's trading jacket

On 5 April 2007, the Guardian newspaper reported that KPMG, the Liquidators of Barings PLC had sold a trading jacket thought to have been worn by

Nick Leeson Nicholas William Leeson (born 25 February 1967) is an English former derivatives trader whose fraudulent, unauthorised and speculative trades resulted in the 1995 collapse of Barings Bank, the United Kingdom's oldest existing merchant bank ...

while trading on SIMEX in Singapore. The jacket was offered for sale on eBay but it failed to reach its reserve price despite a highest bid of £16,100. It was subsequently sold for £21,000. In October 2007 a similar jacket used by Leeson's team but not thought to have been worn by Leeson himself sold at auction for £4,000.

References

Workwear Financial markets {{clothing-stub