Claim 28040cb6Checked 21 Jul 2026
TrueOn the truth scale
“Market-makers deal in numbers.”
Reasoning & Evidence21 Jul 2026
The claim "Market-makers deal in numbers" is a straightforward and accurate description of what market-makers do. According to multiple authoritative sources (Investopedia, NYSE, Wikipedia, Kaplan job descriptions), a market-maker's core function is to continuously quote both bid and ask **prices** (numbers) for securities, along with the **volume** or **size** (also numbers) they are willing to trade. They profit from the bid-ask spread — a numerical difference. Their entire professional activity revolves around pricing, sizing, and tracking numerical market data. Even in Farage's context of working as a market-maker in the City of London, "dealing in numbers" is an apt and literally accurate description of the work: quoting prices, managing positions, and calculating spreads.
No source contradicts this characterization. The claim is simple, well-established, and unambiguously true.
Sources: Investopedia, "Understanding Market Makers: Roles, Profits, and Their Impact on Liquidity," https://www.investopedia.com/terms/m/marketmaker.asp ; NYSE, "Market Makers in Financial Markets: Their Role, How They Function," https://www.nyse.com/publicdocs/nyse/NYSE_Paper_on_Market_Making_Sept_2021.pdf ; Wikipedia, "Market maker," https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_maker ; Kaplan, "Market Maker Job Description," https://jobs.community.kaplan.com/career/market-maker/job-descriptions
From article
The pressure of being a market-maker in a busy market, when you’ve got people all around you screaming and shouting at you and you’re dealing in numbers and it’s like that, that, that, that – that’s pretty pressurised. That’s why it’s a young man’s job. You don’t get many 50-year-old money-brokers: they can’t do it any more. Goodness me! It’s not an easy job. Not an easy job.
When I joined the City, it was the dying days of a gentlemen’s club: magnificent, socially wonderful but going nowhere – there was still a whiff of P G Wodehouse about people who toddled off to the City all day and did things that nobody understood at all. But what I saw in the Eighties and Nineties was London becoming in many ways a genuine global centre for entrepreneurial flair, for innovation, for very hard work – and for creating profits. And without those profits we can’t have the schools and hospitals we need in this country – it’s very, very simple. I am absolutely not conflicted in any way at all about the fact that what we did, overall, was for a social good.
Sources opened
| [1] | investopedia.com |
| [2] | nyse.com |
| [3] | en.wikipedia.org |
| [4] | en.wikipedia.org |
| [5] | ig.com |
| [6] | dev.to |
| [7] | jobs.community.kaplan.com |