About

Sad Guys on Trading Floors is a single topic blog on Tumblr that posts news photographs of distressed stock traders and brokers on the exchange floor.

Origin

The Sad Guys on Trading Floors^[1] blog was created on Tumblr by Kansas City-based interactive art director Chris Riebschlager and San Francisco-based blogger Jess Hemerly on October 7th, 2008, during the week that saw the largest percentage drop in history of the Dow Jones Industrial Average, even worse than any single week during the Great Depression in the United States, in the aftermath of the subprime mortgage crisis which began in 2007.^[2][3] The first post on the site featured a dismayed-looking Asian daytrader with a facepalm gesture:

Spread

On the day of its launch, the blog was first picked up by BoingBoing.^[4] The next day, small collections of photographs from the blog were submitted to eBaumsworld, Metafilter^[13] and Aussie Stock Forums^[9], while another Tumblr blog with a very similar theme was launched under the name "Brokers With Hands on Their Faces."^[5]

Throughout October 2008, the website continued to gain traction on the microblogging platform as concerns of a global-scale economic recession increasingly became inevitable, prompting additional media coverage from the New York Times^[11], Business Insider^[15], The Next Web^[12], Gawker^[10], TIME^[6] and Mashable.^[17] In 2009, Sad Guys on Trading Floors was nominated for a Webby Award^[7] in the Weird category. In August 2011, The Atlantic^[16] and Uproxx^[14] highlighted the blog following yet another major drop in the Dow Jones Industrial Average by more than 600 points in the wake of the downgrading of the U.S. government's credit rating.

Various Examples

Search Interest

Google Search queries for "sad guys on trading floors" peaked the same month the site launched in October of 2008.

External References