And at least in Chicago in the 1990s, traders and clerks could definitely be wild. During slow periods on the CME floor somebody would get a transparent trash bag, declare it a $20 bag, and then walk around with it. People would write their names on $20s and throw them in. Once they'd made the rounds, they'd shake the bag and have somebody draw from it. I myself saw thousands of dollars change hands like this. And clerks would regularly bet one another about jumping into the Chicago river from Upper Wacker, which is a fair drop.
Or there was one incident that was witnessed by a couple of our traders, as it happened in their pit at the CBOT. One afternoon among all the colored coats, they see somebody in a polar bear costume walking around the trading floor between the pits. One trader turns to another and says, "I'll pay you $100 if you punch the polar bear." The trader thinks about it, takes the $100, goes over, lays out the polar bear, and then in the chaos goes back to his pit. This turned out to be a bad trade, as the polar bear was there as a fundraiser for the Lincoln Park Zoo, and one of the people on the zoo's board was also on the exchange's board. Oops!
