Is the stereotype of a businessman shouting "SELL!" and "BUY!" into a telephone in any way attached to reality?

External question — Personal Finance Stack Exchange Author: Jordaan Original post: https://money.stackexchange.com/questions/133493 License: CC BY-SA 4.0 — https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/ Adaptation: HTML converted to plain text; contact email addresses removed. In numerous cartoons and whatnot, you see a rich businessman shouting "BUY!" or "SELL!" into a telephone. Sometimes, it's just that, and sometimes, they may shout the slightly more specific: "SELL MOVIES!" or "BUY BEANS!" I assume that the person on the other end is some kind of "personal stock broker", which somehow perform the actual buying/selling for them, on their command. I further assume that such a person can only be had if you are already rich and can afford for basically an expensive personal assistant. In reality, is this how rich people do (or used to) perform stock market transactions? Do they not say: BUY X AMOUNT OF COMPANY Y'S STOCKS ASAP! ? Do they really just say "BUY!" or "SELL!", or even "BUY GENERIC THING!" or "SELL GENERIC THING!"? Have they agreed in advance on some kind of standardized sum of money for each buy/sell, such as $1,000 or maybe $10,000 or even $100,000? And are the "generic terms" code words that the stock broker knows very well what they mean? Or does the rich business person really just give such vague "hints" to the person actually performing the transactions? And, prior to the Internet and stuff, how did those people actually make/"solidify" the sell/buy transactions?