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.
“Where’s my fill? Where’s my fill?” screamed an irate client. “That was a market order I gave you! Where’s my (expletive deleted) fill?”
Those were among the first words I heard while listening in on a phone call on my first day as a “phone clerk” trainee on the trading floor of New York Commodities Exchange Center (CEC) in September 1982. More than 41 years later, I have retired from the futures business. For a totally unplanned career, it was a great run. I can’t say it was always fulfilling – let’s face it, I wasn’t curing cancer – but I believe my longevity in such a chaotic industry must be worth something, even if only a few stories, a lot of laughs and mostly good memories.
The Floor
I graduated from Iona College in 1982, having studied English Literature, Journalism and U.S. History. So how on earth did I end up on the trading floor of the CEC broking futures? Simple – a childhood and lifelong friend got me a job working for his older brother, also a friend, working for Thomson McKinnon Securities. Up until that time my business experience consisted solely of doing the books at the supermarket where I had worked part-time through my high school and college years and an Economics 101 class at Iona. (I received a B+ and a note from my professor commenting that he thought I had slept through his class; well, it was a 7:30 am class, and it was economics.)
Stepping on to the trading floor, located in 4 World Trade Center, for the first time was overwhelming. The scenes filmed on-site for the movie Trading Places (more on that later) were only a slight exaggeration of the organized chaos that frequently took place.
It was baptism by fire, which I quickly discovered was the way everyone learned on the floor. Mistakes were tolerated – if not too frequent or costly – but you needed a thick skin, a bit of nerve, and a good sense of humor to survive. It’s cliché among those who worked on the floor, but the people were the best. Sure, there were a few jerks, big ones even, and arguments could be heated, occasionally to the point of fisticuffs. Memories, however, were short, and a unique camaraderie permeated amid the fierce competition. These were largely salt of the earth people who mainly came to floor the same way I did – through friends and family. What a colorful cast of characters, with every neighborhood, race and creed in New York City and its suburbs represented. Diversity also extended to economic class. If you weren’t a successful trader, pit broker, manager or perhaps a clerk with book of big clients, in the 1980s you were lucky to be making a few hundred dollars a week. (In 1982, I started at $250.)
Among those many colorful characters inhabiting the floor, my favorite was “Little Joe.”
Little Joe was about 5’ 7” and weighed more than 300 pounds. His nickname was not ironic; we also had a Big Joe. Little Joe was a “deez” and “doze” telex operator from Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, and he was “connected.” As in Goodfellas connected. As in he probably knew guys whose middle name was “The”. So connected that during football season, on Fridays there were daylong lines in front of his telex station – to place bets – and then again on Mondays – to payout and collect. Mostly the latter, of course, and he always collected. Joe kept track of the bets on – what else – our futures order tickets. Instead of Buy 10 July Cotton @ 77.50, it was Giants +7. The bettor got the white sheet on top, and Joe kept the carbon-copy pink sheet below – for his records.
Little Joe, who wore his ex-wife’s diamond-studded wedding ring on his pinky, went out in a blaze of glory. The head of Thomson’s futures division, a guy right out of Wall Street central casting, was compelled to take Joe and my boss out to lunch to celebrate Joe’s 25th anniversary with the firm. It was there, in 1985, that Joe, five martinis in, boldly predicted, “Ya know, Dave, deez crazy kids today. It won’t be long before they start trading effin’ pot!” He wasn’t wrong. While there is no futures market for pot (yet), there are several listed cannabis stocks. We later discovered that Joe hocked the gold retirement watch he was gifted in Atlantic City.
Not having the intestinal fortitude, risk appetite, or basic counting ability to pursue a career in the trading pits, I left the floor in 1984 to join Thomson’s commodity research department, editing the market analysts’ reports (and try to put my degree in English to some use). But not before my cameo in Trading Places. Just before the climactic scene (“Turn those machines back on!”), as the sinister Duke brothers overlook the orange juice pit, there I am, in frame for a fraction of a second, standing by my clerk’s station, hands in pockets, doing absolutely nothing.
What Exactly Do You Do?
As those of us in the business know, ours is an arcane profession, full of esoteric jargon (Contango? Isn’t that an Abba song?) and non-intuitive concepts like short-selling (Selling something you don’t own? What kind of Ponzi scheme is that?). I never was able to explain to my dad what I did for a living, and I gave up trying. God rest his soul, to the day he died, he thought I worked on the stock exchange.
One day my then seven-year-old daughter came home from school with an assignment to interview me about what I did for a living. I hemmed and hawed for a few minutes until I thought I had the perfect answer for a second-grader. “Well you see, Meg, I am a broker. I have customers who want to sell things and other customers who want to buy things. What I do is introduce the people who want to sell to the people who want to buy.” Pretty good, right? She mulled over my explanation for a few moments, and I sensed she was still not quite getting it. Then I gave her a few examples, such as the farmer who grows wheat and the baker who bakes bread with that wheat. She nodded quickly, expressing her growing understanding, and I was quite taken with my ability to distill the oh-so-complicated job I had to a child. After giving Meg a few more examples of buyers and sellers, I thought I detected a look of bemusement.
“Do you have a question, Meg?”
“Yes, if the farmer wants to sell wheat and the baker wants to buy it, why do they need you?”
Great question, Meg. Great question.
9/11
When those soulless mass-murdering miscreants flew two airliners into the Twin Towers on Sep. 11, 2001, I was working for Cargill Investor Services (CIS) in One World Financial Center, less than 500 feet away from the South Tower. As we all soon came to learn, the world changed that day, but in spite of our proximity, my coworkers and I were among the last to know what had transpired. While we heard and felt both explosions and saw the ensuing flames and falling debris, none of us saw or knew the cause. Rumors abounded.
We evacuated our offices immediately after the second tower was struck and gathered along the esplanade astride the Hudson River, from where we began to witness the unfathomable: Human beings falling from the upper floors of the burning towers. I couldn’t watch any more, and a few of us began to walk north toward the Hudson River ferry terminal. Just then the South Tower collapsed. Shielded by the giant glass atrium of the World Financial Center, we narrowly escaped the dust storm and fled further north. A co-worker (now a great friend) and I were were on 7th Avenue somewhere just north of Greenwich Village when we turned back and saw the North Tower collapsing, its needle antenna sinking, seemingly in slow motion, like the bow of a large ship vanishing into the sea. It was such a deflating, sickening feeling, knowing that we had just witnessed, in real time, the death of so many innocent souls. It was only after we had made our way into a midtown bar – about two hours after the nightmare had begun – that we saw the eerie and sickening footage, running in endless loops, of the jetliners disintegrating into the Towers. We then understood we had witnessed mass murder.
Postscript
As most people remember, 9/11/2001 in New York City was a spectacularly beautiful, late summer day. The sky was a shade of deep blue only a poet could properly describe, not marred by a single cloud. (When I finally got home that day, I felt feverish, only to look in the mirror and find I was heavily sunburnt after standing in line for a couple of hours waiting for a midtown ferry to New Jersey.)
For many years thereafter, whenever there was a clear blue sky I would be brought right back, if only for a moment, to the horrors of 9/11. That ticked me off. Those murdering scum had in some way “won,” and in my mind befouled God’s gift of a perfect day.
Then one day it dawned on me that I had stopped associating a clear blue sky with savagery. And you know what? That ticked me off a little, too, because I don’t want to forget that day – ever. So now when I wake to a bright, clear blue sky, I guess I purposely fall into a state of cognitive dissonance. I am grateful to be alive while recalling that evil is real and must be resisted and combatted each and every day.
Postscript 2
The day before 9/11, a Monday, I received a call from a senior manager in our Chicago headquarters who wanted to let me know that my boss in New York, John Carlin, was that morning undergoing brain surgery to remove a tumor. The news floored me, not only because of its ominous nature but also because John was a good friend, and he hadn’t told me he was sick. The latter thought quickly passed, however, because I knew that John could be gregarious at one moment and quite reticent at others. In a word, he was quirky. He was a great friend who did more for my professional career than anyone else.
Fast forward 36 hours and I am home on the couch, trying to decompress from the horrors of the day. The phone rings and my wife, Janey, relays: “John Carlin wants to talk to you.” My head was spinning. I had forgotten entirely about his surgery, and I was confused how he could now be on the phone. Didn’t he have brain surgery yesterday? I don’t remember the specifics of the conversation, except before I could ask him how he was doing (and trying to get straight in my head what day it was), he asked me if I were okay.
John initially recovered well from his surgery and went back to work for a while, but the tumor had been cancerous and could not be removed fully. His fate was sealed, and he passed away in the spring of 2003. I still think of him often, and I will never forget his act of kindness to me on the evening of Sept. 11. Rest in peace, old friend.
Postscript 3
After seven months working at a disaster-recovery site in New Jersey, we came back to our refurbished World Financial Center offices in the spring of 2002. Along with the slight acrid odor still in the air, there was trepidation – after all, the clean-up of “the pile” was still a 24/7 operation, stopping only when the police and firemen were called in to solemnly remove the uncovered remains of one of the murdered victims. But there was also a great deal of pride: Pride in our resilience, pride in our unity (short-lived, as it turned out), and pride in America.
At the time, I managed the metals desk. A few days after the return, I received a call from a hedge fund client, who happened to be a gold bug. (I never did understand those folks; when Armageddon comes and we’re all hovelling in caves, are they supposed to be happy that they have a few bars of bullion socked away in their bunkers?). He was concerned about the location of the gold warrants he owned. You see, amid the still-buried bodies under the collapsed Twin Towers was an as yet unrecovered bank vault that held such warrants, although none of his. But this hedgie was still very concerned. He was afraid of another attack on New York City, perhaps even an atomic one. He didn’t want his warrants anywhere near the tri-state area and was looking for my professional advice on where to store them. “Let me get back to you after I talk to a few people,” I told him, as I watched the heroic clean-up crews hard at work from my office window. Suffice to say, he’s still waiting for my call.
Friends & Clients
You meet many people, hundreds, when you’ve worked as many years and at as many firms as I have. Maybe it’s just my experience (or my personality), but I’ve found business friendships to be mainly transitory. People move on, either through job changes or job losses (or, yes, retirement), and it’s hard to stay in touch, at least for me. That said, a handful of friendships have persisted, and those I value. You know who you are.
With respect to clients, I never found my profession overly conducive to establishing personal relationships. Now it takes two people to be friends – it’s not you, it’s me – so I am not casting any aspersions on the futures industry or the many, many clients I have done business with the past four decades. The vast majority were and are very nice people. It’s just that I struggled with the idea of doing business with friends. “Asking for the order” never came naturally to me, and asking a friend to take a commercial action that would put money in my pocket never felt quite right. Don’t get me wrong. I don’t believe there is anything inherently improper with having a commercial relationship with a friend; I always just struggled with that balance. Yet, there are a few clients who have become very good friends. You know who you are, too.
I have always been in the service industry, including as a child and teen when I served the Catholic nuns, priests and brothers from grammar through high school. Before inadvertently embarking on my career in futures, I had been a day-camp counselor and then, as mentioned, I worked in a supermarket. While the customer may not always be right, I learned early to appreciate that the customer ultimately paid my salary and so was entitled to a high degree of deference, even when wrong. And that has forever been my attitude as a futures broker.
On those rare occasions when clients were, let’s say, upset, I understood that in most cases they were under tremendous pressure, and the stakes were high (although I felt sometimes some didn’t always appreciate the stress brokers faced; after all, when markets were chaotic, we had many clients and many markets to deal with simultaneously). I had grown that thick skin, bit my tongue and let snarky remarks roll off my back.
I almost lost it with a client only one time. While at CIS in the mid-90s, we brokered orders for the chief dealer at what was then the largest gold-dealing bank in the world. He was a tough and demanding client, but he paid us a lot of money. He was also generally fair and appreciative – I believed – of the good service we provided.
Then one Friday he gave us an especially large and difficult order to execute moments before the market’s close. We accepted the order on a “not held” basis. The size of the order moved the market significantly, and he was irate when it took several minutes for our pit broker to tally up the trade (“Where’s my fill?”) and enraged when I began to give him the prices. “You own it,” he bellowed before hanging up on me. Of course, there was no way he could not accept the trade, but I waited several minutes to allow him to cool off. When I called him back to confirm the prices, he commenced with a profanity-laced tirade that would have made a seaman – or pit broker – blush. This went on for several minutes. I would periodically place the phone down on the desk or twirl it over my head, but he would still be ranting when I put it back to my ear. Finally there was pause. “Chris, may I explain what happened?” I asked meekly. In response, he sputtered: “Did I say you could talk?” I muted the phone for a few seconds to let out a few choice words of my own, unmuted it and said, “Chris, I’ll send you a recap. Have a nice weekend.” He remained a good client, or at least a good-paying one.
Technology
When I began my career in on the floor, the phone and hand signals were the primary communication tools. You knew you made is as a phone clerk on the floor when you manned the “hoot ‘n holler,” which allowed brokers from multiple global offices to enter orders in all markets over a shared phone line (something that would not even be compliant today!). State-of-the-art communication technology consisted mainly of the Telex, from which orders were received and fills reported back. Quotron (with its boxy green text on a black screen) dominated financial-data delivery. I don’t think I got my first desktop computer until the mid 1990s.
Funny thing about the Telex. Because transmission fees were based on the length of the message, a glossary of abbreviations and acronyms was developed to reduce the length and, therefore, the costs of messages. I thought I had forgotten all that; that is, until the advent of instant and text messaging.
Electronic trading changed everything. As Hemingway described the two ways one goes bankrupt, floor trading ended “gradually, then suddenly.” My decision early in my career to leave the floor no doubt extended my time in the futures industry, and I was later fortunate to spend five years with a provider of trading software just as algorithmic trading began to take off. By the end of my career, I still had a phone, but it was not uncommon to go an entire day without talking to a client; instead, just about all communication was done via email and especially chatting on Bloomberg, the $2,000-per-month instant-messaging service. (There goes my shot of getting this published in Bloomberg.)
Career
I fell into this career. I was the first in my family to go to college (which honestly doesn’t mean much in this business, if it means anything at all), but all that meant to my Dad was that I had waited four years to get a job. So when my friend offered me the opportunity on the floor working for his brother, I immediately accepted. (Hey, $250 a week!)
Aside from the aforementioned stint with the software vendor, I worked on the sell-side for eight brokerage firms over more than 36 years. My last employer, Societe Generale remains successful in the future business, but the other seven – Thomson, E.F. Hutton, Shearson Lehman Hutton, CIS (where I spent 18 years), Refco, Man Financial and Newedge – are all long gone. I assure you my SocGen friends, this is just a coincidence.
I witnessed a lot of history through the prism of the futures markets: wars, terrorist attacks (I was also right next door to the 1993 WTC bombing), market crashes, financial scandals, natural disasters, and of course Covid (which increasingly seems likely to have been a man-made disaster).
All these disastrous events impacted the markets in dramatic fashion, which in most cases was – and there’s really no other way to put this – good for business. I don’t lose any sleep about that reality. I do believe that the futures markets in the end mainly served their intended purpose as the best mechanism to mitigate risk and in most cases help prevent bad situations from getting worse. I also know that brokers get paid for managing risk, so it certainly makes sense that increased risk should mean increased reward. And yet…
I really have no complaints about my career when measured in its entirety. As chronicled, I’ve had many interesting and fun times, met some great people, established lasting friendships, and financially I’ve been able to put the kids through college and pay off the mortgage.
No complaints. But regrets? Like Sinatra, I have a few. But I won’t bore you with those. Besides, you can’t change your past, only your future.
“Where’s my fill? Where’s my fill?” I don’t know, and I don’t care. I’ve had my fill.
Tom Griffo worked at Societe Generale, FlexTrade, and Cargill Investor Services, among other firms, over a 41-year career.
