It’s often much harder to understand what they’re talking about on the trading floor. “I saw some tweets of people saying they love the show, but they have no idea of what’s going on,” Mickey Down, the show’s co-creator, tells TIME. “We forget that actually the majority of the audience has absolutely no idea what any of this terminology, plus all the British slang, means. It’s a miracle that people are able to follow it at all.
What the creators have since realized is that a majority of viewers aren’t all that concerned about understanding the overly complicated financial dialogue. They’re interested in the world ofwhich expertly depicts the pressures that come with a high-stress job—especially, when you’re just starting out.’s characters and give the show a sense of foreboding
creators and those who work in finance to understand the rhythm of how stock traders really speak. Down recalls having dinner with a fairly well-known hedge fund manager who couldn’t believe that Ken Leung, who plays Eric Tao, Pierpoint’s number one producer and Harper’s de facto mentor, had never actually worked on the trading room floor. “He was like, ‘No, he must have!’ And we were like, ‘No, he’s an actor. That’s his job to pretend he worked in trading,’” Down says. “He couldn’t grasp it.
Down and Kay like to infuse the show with British slang that traders in The City use to talk about both work and the extracurricular activities that take place outside of it. An example is “printing,” which can refer to a few different financial-related things: a government issuing new currency or the price of a securities trade being time stamped by an exchange. More often than not though, the traders onuse the term to talk about their sex lives without tipping off their bosses.