[Domalais]

Commodity prices were vastly more stable when markets were physical places where brokers, acting on snail mail instructions or a telegraph, made trades.

That’s far from the case now.

[expat_panama]

"Commodity prices were vastly more stable when markets were physical places where brokers, acting on snail mail instructions or a telegraph, made trades."

So we can imagine.   Reality is that it was madness...

Figure 2: "A flurry in wheat at the Chicago Board of Trade," 1880. Reprinted from Harper's New Monthly Magazine, October 1880, 725

Read more at Contemplating Delivery: Futures Trading and the Problem of Commodity Exchange in the United States, 1875–1905