What it means
In a fast market, sentences lose trades. When prices move several times a minute, a buyer who begins a sentence with 'I would like to' finds the offer gone before the verb arrives.
Dealing slang evolved to compress agreement into single, unmistakable words. Mine and yours were the core pair.
Shout mine in a pit, or type it to a broker in an interbank currency market, and you had bought at the offered price. Say yours, and you had sold at the bid.
Equally brisk variants flourished: buy 'em and sold carried the same meanings on different floors. The words carried legal weight.
A trade agreed by shout or phone was binding the moment the word left the trader, which is why the vocabulary had to be unambiguous in a hall full of noise and hand signals. Electronic trading retired the ritual.
When most futures pits closed in the mid-2010s, industry commentators marked the end of an era that had lasted well over a century, and the shouts of mine and yours fell silent with them. The vocabulary survives in corners of the market.
Interbank foreign exchange dealers still quote and accept prices in clipped dealing language on chat and voice lines, and old pit terms surface in films and trading-room folklore. For a modern manager, the terms are a reminder of what markets are underneath the screens: agreements between people, made fast and binding.
Every electronic fill inherits the same instant finality that a shouted mine once carried.
In practice
Real-world examples.
Example
A broker offers call options at 1.00 in a crowded pit. A market maker who wants them shouts mine, and the trade is done at 1.00 before the next quote is uttered. The clerk records the price, quantity and counterparty on a trading card.
Example
An interbank dealer is quoted 1.0850-52 on a currency pair. She types mine and buys at 1.0852; a minute later the same dealer types yours on a fresh quote and sells at the bid. Both trades are binding and appear in the back-office records within moments.
Example
A trader learning on a simulator is drilled to respond with the exact convention of the desk, because a hesitation or wrong word in a live market can buy when the desk meant to sell. The trainer replays recorded calls to show how a single word changed the position.
Formula
Calculation
The convention is binary: at a two-way quote, mine = trade at the offer (the higher price) as buyer, yours = trade at the bid (the lower price) as seller. The spread is offer - bid, and it is the market maker's margin.
Worked example. On a quote of 1.0850 bid and 1.0852 offered for euro against US dollar, a dealer who shouts mine buys 1,000,000 euros at 1.0852 and pays $1,085,200. A dealer who shouts yours sells 1,000,000 euros at 1.0850 and receives $1,085,000. The spread is 1.0852 - 1.0850 = 0.0002, which on 1,000,000 euros is $200, the market maker's margin on a round trip.Case study
Seen in the real world.
Fictional example: Corven & Dale, an imagined old brokerage, kept a single voice-broking desk long after its screens took over, serving clients who liked a human quote. A junior dealer, new from an electronic venue, once typed yours when the desk convention that day required the fuller phrase, and sold a block the client had meant to buy. The error was unwound within minutes at a small loss, but the fictional compliance review that followed read like a history lesson. It quoted pit cases where one word had moved millions, and it mandated confirmation read-backs on every voice trade.
The senior broker closed the meeting by noting that markets abandoned the shout for the screen, but never abandoned the rule that agreement, once expressed, is a trade. The firm also began recording and archiving voice lines so any dispute could be settled from the tape. The names and figures are invented.
Watch out
Common mistakes.
- Treating dealing slang as colourful trivia, when every accepted quote, by word or click, forms a binding trade with real settlement obligations.
- Assuming the terms reversed meaning by desk or venue, when mine always means the speaker buys and yours always means the speaker sells.
- Believing voice conventions died with the pits, when interbank and block markets still close large trades by voice and chat every day.
Questions
People also ask.
Where did mine and yours come from?
From open-outcry trading pits and telephone dealing, where prices moved fast and traders needed single, unambiguous words to accept bids and offers. The pit era effectively ended in the mid-2010s.
Is a trade by spoken word actually binding?
Yes. In professional markets an accepted quote forms a contract immediately, which is why the vocabulary was drilled for precision and why recordings of voice lines are kept.
Are the terms still used today?
Mostly in interbank foreign exchange and block dealing over voice or chat. Screen-based retail traders meet the same finality as a click, without the vocabulary. The habit of instant, final acceptance is unchanged.
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