“... a richly detailed memoir of a working life.  From page one, the reader is immersed in the heady history of Wall Street.” Best Business Books 2002

“...a smart and salty memoir.... Siebert is the real deal, and this book is a great way to get to know her.” Money

“Siebert, who in 1967 became the first woman to have a seat on the New York Stock Exchange, has led a fascinating life. And her stories of fighting for acceptance--and profits--in what was then an all-male fraternity are engaging.” Washington Post

“It’s possible to read the book just for the adventure and the humor. Ms. Siebert and her co-author, Aimee Lee Ball, have come up with some wickedly funny lines.” New York Times

        When I left Cleveland with five hundred dollars and a used Studebaker just before Thanksgiving 1954, I had been away from home and family only once. Travel was too extravagant and expensive in my childhood, except for the occasional overcrowded, overheated motor trip to Florida. But that one trip the previous summer was a vacation in New York City with two girlfriends.

        Our teenaged excursion with a busload of other gawking tourists included the New York Stock Exchange, where a guide explained how the market was made: Trading was conducted at oak-and-brass posts called horseshoes, connected by pneumatic tubes to the stock ticker. Outside the posts stood specialists, who were expected to maintain an orderly market by buying and selling particular securities for their own accounts and by acting as agents in specific stocks. Members of the Exchange negotiated with these middlemen and with one another. If the highest price anyone was willing to bid for “ABC Widgets” was $65, and the lowest price anyone was offering for selling the stock was $66, the specialist might bid $65 ½ to narrow the spread between supply and demand, entering his buy and sell orders in a loose-leaf notebook. Fines were imposed on the clerks who wrote the orders and took them to the brokers if they ran rather than walked across the imposing room, two-thirds the size of a football field, with rich Georgian marble and a five-story-high ceiling decorated in genuine gold leaf....

        What I saw as I looked down from the visitors’ gallery was a sea of men in dark suits, punctuated by the occasional pastel jacket of a runner or clerk. The wooden floor itself was literally covered with paper slips, the detritus of deal making, to be swept up at the end of the day. What I heard was the clamorous human buzz of those thousands of deals, none of it muffled by the bullet-proof glass that now protects the inhabitants of this microcosm from the public. (The glass went up after a 1967 Yippie protest led by Abbie Hoffman, who rained dollar bills down on the traders’ heads.)

        Only a few flimsy stadium-style seats that flipped up when not in use lined the walls of rather ramshackle wooden cubicles around the circumference of the room. But nobody was sitting down. Quite the contrary--the very act of standing in place seemed to constitute an isometric exercise, so inclined to motion did everyone seem. I didn’t understand any of the arcane two- or three-letter symbols for the companies scrolling by on the “black box” ticker, but I realized that every one of them represented a transaction taking place--perhaps a hundred dollars, perhaps a million.

        I never had a strategy, no long-term game plan. But after absorbing all that fierce energy, I turned to my friends and said, “Now, this is exciting. Maybe I’ll come back here and look for a job.” At that time, tourists were given a piece of ticker tape printed with their name as a souvenir. I still have the few inches of worn and faded tape that said, “Welcome to the NYSE, Muriel Siebert.”

Turns out I wasn’t so welcome after all.