Full name: The London International Financial Futures and Options Exchange (pronounced "life").
Appearance: Seething pit of Leesonesque cockney barrow boys made good, clad in migraine-inducing jackets, bellowing incomprehensibly and gesticulating wildly.
Normal cockney behaviour, surely? That's enough snobbery. Not that the Liffe traders give a monkey's what you think: they use their system of signals to pull in salaries of up to £500,000, doing deals worth £200bn a day.
Drugs have got to be involved in this somewhere. Nope - the boys at Liffe (plus a handful of girls) make their honest millions trading in the most arcane financial instruments around.
They're loan sharks. I knew it. Futures and options brokers, actually, dealing in forward-projected assessments of risk in price fluctuations of pork bellies, cocoa, stuff like that. The only problem is they haven't got much of a future themselves.
It's the end of Liffe as we know it? Precisely. The hard-nosed global financial system is no respecter of quaint London traditions, so today the vast majority of trading switches to a leaner, meaner computer system.
Will the boys in blue (and red and orange and green and yellow) go quietly? Unlikely. The exchange is famed for its loud-mouthed obscenity. Traders are occasionally fined for using foul language, and female brokers are routinely asked "any chance of a blow job?" by male rivals.
What will the poor dears do now? Some will stay on as computer operators; others, according to one trader, will make that other stereotypical cockney career move and become cabbies.
Any other options for the future? "We got birds trading now," one Liffe trader notes. "If they want to make the same kind of money, they'll have to go topless table-dancing."
Don't say: "I had one of them former Liffe traders in the front of my cab the other day."
Do say: "Anyone fancy buying an option on this attractively striped blazer?"
