Jobber

The original liquidity provider

A jobber is a trader who deals on his own account, quoting prices to other brokers and profiting from the tiny gap between his buy and sell quotes, the bid-ask spread. Jobbers do not invest for the long term; they turn over positions constantly within the trading day, and in doing so they supply the liquidity that lets others trade whenever they want.

In the classic system a broker acted for clients while the jobber stood ready to buy or sell, never disclosing whether he was a buyer or seller until he quoted both prices, the so-called double quote.

The Indian context

The jobber was a fixture of the old open-outcry Bombay Stock Exchange, the era before the NSE's screen-based trading and the dematerialisation of shares around the turn of the century. That period also ran on the indigenous badla carry-forward system, which let traders postpone settlement for a fee and was, by some estimates, behind the overwhelming majority of BSE trades by the late 1990s.

When India moved to electronic trading, rolling settlement and demat, the badla system was phased out and the floor jobber largely disappeared.

Where the role lives now

The jobber as a person on a trading floor is gone, but the function never went away. It has been absorbed by electronic market makers, proprietary trading desks and high-frequency algorithms that continuously post two-way quotes on the NSE and BSE.

The economics are identical: earn the spread, take small positions, exit fast, and keep the market liquid. So while you will not meet a jobber today, every time you buy a share and an order is instantly waiting on the other side, you are benefiting from the same role the jobber once played by hand on the BSE floor.