Mr. Smith said Mr. O'Malley's oil-trader background served shareholders in another way: he viewed refineries as assets.
Lloyd Blankfein, the chief executive of Goldman Sachs, is a trader by background.
Mr. Cohn, a trader by background who rose through the Goldman ranks alongside Mr. Blankfein, functioned for years as the C.E.O.'s top lieutenant and as one of the firm's top emissaries to Washington and beyond.
"The misogynist, racist, anti-environmentalist, and foreign policy and trade issues aside, he just isn't presidential," said a proprietary trader, also speaking on background.
CNBC clearly knew it was onto ratings gold: not only could viewers hear traders gasping in the background, but CNBC quickly slapped a label on it: "Billionaire Showdown".
Rodrigo Brantes, who leads Sebrae classes in Rio, says that the workshops can be particularly useful for sole traders from poorer backgrounds, who "live quite precariously day-to-day in terms of business".
The launch of the auction is yet another sign of the professionalization of the space, which has seen the entrance of market makers and other traders with professional backgrounds over the last year or two, plus efforts, including one by the Winklevoss twins, at creating Bitcoin ETFs that could attract more retail and institutional investors with a more easily investable security.
But it will never be that for me, and my long background as a trader and researcher has prompted me many times to burrow further to the bedrock, the cause of the crash of 2008.
But the photogenic young trader from a humble Breton background tapped into another deep French tradition, which is popular mistrust of banks and the élite grands-écoles graduates who run them.
My background is a trader on Wall Street and I lost money.
