The thing that most struck me about the trading floor on which I spent a morning last week, was how like a newsroom it was. Sure, the watches were (much) more expensive and the shirts somewhat better tailored; there were fewer women and far more computer screens. But the similarities vastly outweighed the differences.

Here was a group of people assimilating and filtering information so as to sort the important from the inconsequential. It looked a lot like what journalists do.