Uncomfortable brush with reality for market's 'geezers'

The jokey end of the stockmarket is suddenly a lot less entertaining. In times good and bad a certain crowd of chancers and drinkers could be relied upon for fun, if not good investment advice.

At smaller stockbroking firms men in pinstripes who don't make it on to News at Ten would gossip, exaggerate and delight in the public perception of them as rogue traders - heartless types profiting from the misery of others.

This caricature was always a little unfair and in most cases they were shifting such small parcels of shares that their effect on the wider market was minimal.

Some of them embraced the stereotype all the same, enjoyed the notion that the stockmarket is a casino for clever geezers and that only losers took life seriously.

When the downturn began the rowdy crowd shrugged. "If you ain't got half a bar put away you're a fool," said one. Half a bar is £500,000 - enough to see that luxuries can still be afforded when commissions stop rolling in.

Today the same source was tentative. "You hearing anything?

What's going on?" they asked. Things aren't yet so bad that the brokers are doubting their way of life, but these are darker times than any of them have ever seen.

They certainly aren't blaming themselves: ask who's at fault for the slump and you get two culprits - the regulators and the press.

By this telling, the Financial Services Authority can't regulate the market because it doesn't understand it, so makes rules in all the wrong places. The press makes everything worse by doubling investor panic - a comical complaint from folk whose favoured methods for getting people to buy or sell shares are known as "pump and dump" or "trash and cash".

An analyst at one of the grander City firms said today: "I never thought I'd say this, but I feel sorry for people at Lehman Brothers. All this time I've been wishing them to fail because I thought we'd get more business. Now I'm thinking, at least I've still got a job."

Suddenly the wheeler-dealers aren't so bouncy. Fears about mortgages and credit card payments are cropping up in conversations that would usually be full of blarney.

Even those dealers prepared to be named admit that times are harsh.

"We're in the lull after the storm and in the lull potentially before the next storm," says bond trader Lawrie Inman, who was named as one of world's top financial traders under 30 and dubbed "The face of new City" by the Evening Standard.

Speaking at his desk at Marex Trading by Liverpool Street station, Inman, 27, admits life is fraught.

"It hasn't been completely insane," he says. "We have seen crazier days and it has not been as insane as, for example, the day when the news of the rogue trader at Société Générale came out.

"In our office we are all locals [self-employed traders] and the amount of volatility is producing opportunities. But it's a two-sided coin. For everyone who is winning, someone is losing.

"But I wouldn't want to be working in a bank."