Desks, Floors, and Discount Houses

Desks, floors, and discount houses are operational terms for where and how intermediaries handle trades, quotes, funding-market activity, or floor-based market functions. This branch helps readers distinguish internal trading desks from venue floors and historical discount-house terminology.

Use these pages when a record mentions a Trading Desk, Dealing Desk, Trading Floor, or Discount House.

What This Branch Covers

Decision Lens

Start with the operating location or desk name in the record. A trading desk may be an internal product unit, a dealing desk may quote to customers, a trading floor may describe a venue location, and a discount house may refer to a specialized historical intermediary.

Evaluation Checklist

• Identify whether the term names an internal desk, venue floor, dealer unit, or historical institution.
• Check product scope, client role, quote source, and execution report.
• Separate physical-location terms from legal capacity and account responsibility.
• Use market-maker pages when the question is quote provision rather than desk organization.
• Avoid drawing compliance or supervision conclusions from desk labels alone.

Common Mistakes

• Treating a trading desk as a venue.
• Assuming every dealing desk is a market maker in every product.
• Reading historical discount-house terms as current brokerage roles.
• Ignoring whether a floor reference is physical, procedural, or historical.

In this section

Choose a subsection first. Deeper term pages live inside each subsection, which keeps large topic hubs readable.