(FLASH FRIDAY is a weekly content series looking at the past, present and future of capital markets trading and technology. FLASH FRIDAY is sponsored by Instinet, a Nomura company.)
The International Futures Industry Conference, colloquially known as FIA Boca, takes place March 9-12 in Boca Raton, Florida.
This isn’t an ordinary FIA Boca – it’s Boca50, marking the event’s 50th year.
Holding a conference in an always-evolving marketplace for one decade, let alone five, is a feat, and FIA deserves major kudos for still going strong after a half century, surviving a global financial crisis, a pandemic, and more. For an event that started on the eve of peak disco, when Gerald Ford was US President and the Dow Jones Industrial Average was sub-1,000, 50 years later it’s as big and as influential as ever.
Flash Friday is keen on looking back at the past, and we wanted to see what we could find out about the early days of the conference. There’s a musty and yellowed version of the inaugural 1976 futures conference at the bottom of a banker’s box in someone’s garage somewhere.
In that spirit, we reached out to FIA, but ahead of their event they were understandably busy and unable to revert in time for publication.
We did find some info online. Apparently the 1976 conference was held in Innisbrook, Florida, on the Gulf Coast and about a four-hour drive from Boca. In a 2012 FIA Boca keynote, CFTC Chairman Rostin Behnam cited some conference highlights over the years, ranging from “CBOT’s 1989 unveiling of ‘Aurora’, an electronic trading system designed to simulate pit trading on a trading screen, noting that “traders will use a pointing device known as a ‘mouse,’” to Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan’s initial 1999 address to this audience via satellite transmission—which would be reprised in 2007—and the 2011 announcement of FIA’s expanded mission to include cleared swaps.”
Then we turned to the Wayback Machine. Of course there was no internet in 1976, so our quest for the elusive 1976 conference program will have to go unfulfilled, at least for now. But the internet archive stored some FIA pages as far back as 2001, so we were able to discover some info about the 2002 conference, 23 years ago.
First we were struck by how rudimentary the website was.
Another fun-filled factoid: for many years FIA.org was the site for Footwear Industries of America.
The March 2002 Boca conference was promoted as follows:
“Futures industry professionals attend the International Futures Industry Conference to exchange ideas, share information, discuss trends and network with peers. Boca has been the showcase for innovation. The place to introduce new products and express new ideas. The venue to seek convergence of the industry. Twenty-six years ago it was primarily a U.S. event. Today brokerage executives, exchange officials, policymakers, money managers and service providers come from more than 30 countries.”
So, the broad strokes of the 2002 event are essentially the same as today. But drilling down into the program, there are some interesting areas of focus that were unique to their time.
For example, the “Markets 2002 – The Next Generation” panel cited exchange demutualization as a major theme; the electronic trading panel was about refining error policies; and the energy markets panel presented the landscape in the wake of Enron’s collapse.
Nary a mention of AI or crypto.
So that’s a little flavor of FIA Boca, then and now. And if any kind reader has a pre-internet futures conference program, please get in touch!
