RISE OF THE NEW YORK STOCK EXCHANGE 83
The Odd-Lot Dealer and the Floor Trader.—As for the
dealers, the odd-lot dealer buys and sells less than the trading
unit of 100 shares of stock. So complex is his work that consideration
 of it must be deferred to a later chapter.?? Then
there is the floor trader,” who is a free-lance dealer in all stocks
listed on the Exchange, and who will buy or sell any of them
on his own account whenever he sees the likelihood of a profit
in the transaction. The floor trader performs a function very
useful in the work of the Exchange, by constantly helping to
create close prices for stocks and thus enhance their negotiability.
 Both the odd-lot dealer and the floor trader act for
themselves rather than as agents for other principals, and their
earnings depend in consequence upon obtaining a profitable difference
 between the buying and selling prices of their transactions
 rather than upon any commission such as the brokers
obtain

The Specialist.—I ast and most difficult of all to define,
is the specialist.** Usually the specialist, as indeed his name
would imply, specializes as a dealer or broker in a particular
security or securities located at a single post. He is not allowed
to act as both dealer and broker in any single transaction, and
he cannot charge a commission while he profits by the sale of a
security at a higher price than that at which it was purchased.
Commission brokers often turn over their orders to the
specialist to execute, as a broker and their agent, on the same
basis as with the “two-dollar” broker. Some specialists act as
dealers in 100-share orders, and occasionally in odd-lot orders
as well. In the former case their work resembles that of a floor
trader, except that it is concentrated on one stock or group of
stocks ; in the latter case, of odd-lot orders, they do in their
few special stocks what the odd-lot house does in all stocks.
In addition to the above brokers, dealers, and traders in

2 See Chapter IX.
B® See Chapter VIII.
M bid.
% See Chapter VIII.