A different kind of competition takes over a few Wall Street trading floors every December, somewhere between the Santa hats and the year-end bonus rumors. There is no sponsor for it. No HR calendar displays it. Once it begins, very little else on the desk gets done because it’s a dreidel tournament that is almost entirely conducted off the books.
Although most traders who have played in one floor can trace the tradition back to a few Jewish desk heads who brought dreidels in as a joke sometime in the late 1990s and never stopped, no one seems to know exactly which floor started it. On some floors, what started out as a few spins during a leisurely afternoon has evolved into something more akin to a bracket—single elimination, seeded by seniority or plain trash talk, with sticky notes taped to monitors keeping score.
The mechanics are so basic that they are almost offensive. Depending on how much risk the desk is willing to take, you can spin a four-sided top, land on a Hebrew letter, or win or lose a small pot of poker chips, M&Ms, or real dollar bills. It’s difficult to ignore the irony of a children’s game that relies solely on chance genuinely upsetting adults who move nine-figure positions before lunch. As you watch it happen, you get the impression that the dreidel eliminates all of the models and spreadsheets these people rely on, leaving them with nothing but luck, and for some reason, that’s what makes it enjoyable for them.
The game is rarely straightforward for very long because traders are traders. The odds on who is most likely to land a gimel—the letter that wins the entire pot—are layered in side bets on some desks. Some have added a kind of halftime show, which is more affectionate parody than anything else. It involves stopping the bracket for someone to read the rules aloud in an exaggerated Yiddish accent. Perhaps the attraction isn’t the dreidel per se, but rather the infrequent opportunity to act a little foolish in a structure that otherwise operates with poise.
Speaking with a few people who have participated in these competitions over the years, I’ve noticed how much they sound more like they’re describing a Little League game than anything taking place inside an investment bank. Every December, a man who allegedly hasn’t won in eleven years is made fun of for it. A managing director is said to take the entire situation more seriously than his quarterly results, which illustrates how desperate trading floors can be for low-stakes entertainment.
It’s important to state clearly that this isn’t a corporate wellness program or an approved diversity event dressed up in a menorah. It endures because no one is in control of it. This informality appears to be the whole point—a small, somewhat ridiculous ritual that traders created for themselves and have simply kept alive, year after year, mostly by word of mouth. Compliance hasn’t been taken into consideration, and marketing hasn’t branded it.
It’s genuinely unclear if this kind of thing spreads to additional floors or eventually disappears as desks rotate and institutional memory wanes. These kinds of customs usually depend on the person who cares enough to maintain them. However, the closing bell isn’t always the most contentious part of the December trading day in a few glass towers downtown. Whoever lands the gimel is sometimes the winner.