There is a well-known Goldman Sachs line — well, a well-known genre of Wall Street observation — that the stock exchange floor is no longer a place where stocks get traded so much as a place where television gets filmed. The New York Stock Exchange once had more than 3,000 brokers and clerks packed onto its floor; by 2007 that was down to around 1,700, the New York Times reported at the time, and the NYSE these days declines to provide a current headcount, which is itself a kind of answer. The vast majority of stock trades now execute digitally. What the humans who remain mostly do is stand near a camera looking animated while the market does something.
No human has ever done this job better than Peter Tuchman. Tuchman — the “Einstein of Wall Street,” named for a genuinely spectacular shock of white hair — is the most photographed trader on the NYSE floor, a man whose animated expressions have illustrated roughly four decades of “stocks fell today” news segments. He has bobbleheads of himself on his desk and cartoon stickers of himself riding a bull around his computer, which suggests a healthy relationship with the whole arrangement.
And now the ultimate acknowledgment: MARKET SAVANT, a life-size bronze sculpture of Tuchman by the artist Matt Snider, recently unveiled at the NYSE to celebrate, as his team puts it, the 234 years of the human broker at the exchange. A bronze statue is a lovely tribute to a man. It is also, if you think about it for more than a second, a slightly ominous tribute to a job category. You do not generally build statues of things that are fully alive and thriving. You build statues of founders, and war heroes, and extinct species. “234 years of the human broker” is the kind of phrase you carve on something when you are not sure there will be a 235th worth celebrating the same way.
Tuchman himself seems to understand this perfectly, because his actual project these days — alongside his son Benny, also a broker at the exchange — is advocacy. The two have become, per Benny, the NYSE’s loudest campaigners for preserving human labor in the age of AI. The pitch is that a real person involved in a transaction fosters trust with clients, and that human brokers still add value on the larger and more complex orders institutions send in, even as the routine stuff has long since gone to the machines.
Is that a good pitch or a desperate one? Consider the numbers. Wall Street was being hollowed out by digital trading before AI arrived; AI is now eating the scutwork that defined junior and back-end roles. Most finance leaders say AI investment will maintain or even increase headcount this year — but 28% of financial CEOs surveyed by EY predicted AI would lead to headcounts dropping. That 28% is the number the “humans foster trust” campaign is aimed at. The Tuchmans’ argument, translated, is: a broker is not a cost center that executes trades, he is a relationship asset that makes an institution feel okay about its trades. Which, note, is also exactly what the bronze statue is for. The statue doesn’t execute anything either. It makes people feel something about the NYSE.
Tuchman’s advocacy has the flavor of total commitment. He tells Business Insider he sleeps four hours a day and works 20, that he often works from dinner to bedtime, that he rarely goes out. When he was recently in the hospital, his son says, his team confiscated his phone to stop him from posting while he recovered. There is something both moving and very funny about this: the man is so committed to demonstrating the irreplaceable value of a human broker that he will not stop human-brokering even under anesthesia’s aftermath. The robot, famously, does not need to sleep. The human’s competitive response to the robot is apparently to sleep as little as possible.
The honest assessment is that the floor broker’s best argument for survival is the one Tuchman embodies, which is not really about execution quality at all. It is about celebrity, ceremony and continuity — the opening bell, the famous face, the statue. The NYSE keeps humans around for the same reason it unveiled MARKET SAVANT: because a stock exchange with no people in it is just a data center in New Jersey, and nobody puts a bronze statue in a data center.