Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: My name is John Pichek and I was a floor trader at the Board of Trade, floor droiter and floor broker and the principal along with trading.
[00:00:11] Speaker B: So my first question for you is what did you want to be when you grew up and what did your parents want you to be?
[00:00:20] Speaker A: Yeah, so when I got old enough to think about that, wanted to be either an accounting partner, which is a job for life, or VP of Finance, which is the equivalent of CFO at Major Company or something like that. And my mother was a nurse and she always thought I was going to be a doctor. And I started out in premed for my first semester and decided I wasn't going to be a doctor and then switched to finance and account.
[00:00:52] Speaker B: Tell me about how your family found its way to the exchange because that's directly related to how you found your way to the exchange.
[00:01:01] Speaker A: Oh, yeah, without a doubt. My grandfather, when he was in 8th grade, used to cut grass for all the fancy houses on the South Shore. And one day when he was cutting grass for a guy, he said, you know, kid, what are you doing? He said, Well, I'm probably going to have to go to work in the steel mills or something like that. And he said, well, why don't you come down and work for me? I'm at the Board of Trade. I'm on the trading floor. You'll run for us and you'll make more money than you will on the steel mills. And so that's what he did. When he was 13 years old, he went down to the trading floor as a runner, trading assistant, such as it was in 1913. And that's how it started. He bought a seat. He worked for a couple of different companies, and then there was a guy by the name of Fred Lewis who owned FS. Lewis and Company. And in 1929, before the world came to an end, he bought a seat because that was the start of the Dust Bowl years and the commodity markets were very busy, except for when they know price controls on. During the war, the Board of Trade was always a very good place to earn a living.
[00:02:20] Speaker B: So then he brought your father down to the exchange as well.
[00:02:24] Speaker A: So then my father originally graduated to Paul University and then went to work for Livestock National Bank and decided that he wasn't going to be a banker. And he came down on the trading floor and was a phone man for Dean Whitter because he used to have a membership just to answer the phone. And then in 1967, he became a cornbroker, went into the pit with my grandfather, and then it was one big happy fail. I bought my seat in 1979.
[00:03:00] Speaker B: And were the three of you in the pit at one time?
[00:03:04] Speaker A: So my grandfather had, for the most part retired from the pit but my father and I were in the same spot in the corn pit for until 1996 when he retired.
And that was about the same time, I think, as things started to go electronic, things went electronic and then Timber Hill wanted to bring their electronic order entry and things down there. Things started to change, but until the CME closed the pits, there was still a way to execute and trade from the trading floor that was fairly vibrant. If people wanted exceptional things done with their orders the same way they do with the options doing one by twelve and things like that, that the computers weren't ready to handle or if they wanted to do different spreads, more exotic spreads that stuff wasn't on the screen yet either, so that was a boon for the people that were still there.
[00:04:04] Speaker B: What kind of companies did you and your father and grandfather fill orders for?
[00:04:11] Speaker A: Just a little bit of everything. We had commercial grain companies, we had the commission houses, we had the local firms with hideaway business and stuff like that, so a little bit of everybody.
[00:04:30] Speaker B: So explain to me hideaway business.
[00:04:33] Speaker A: When the big commercial grain companies didn't want the whole world knowing what they were doing, then they'd split the orders up and they'd go through Gersenberg or Mallors or Hennessy, things like that. Those firms got a big boost when that business became fashionable.
Especially the foreign subsidiaries of the big grain companies would didn't want it known exactly what they were doing.
[00:05:07] Speaker B: Yeah. Where in the corn pit did you stand?
[00:05:13] Speaker A: My father and I were in the second option in the center, but then both of us also filled spread orders and that you had to kind of be everywhere, at least in the beginning you had to be everywhere. And then when we moved over to the new trading floor, there was kind of a corner where most of the spreads were done. And then when the role got to be a significant portion of business, actually the most significant portion of the business, then that was all in one corner.
[00:05:41] Speaker B: What was your deck like? Did you handle your own deck? And how big do you remember your deck being?
[00:05:50] Speaker A: So I remember Whitey King who was on the top step and had beige in any number of commission houses, and those were all individual orders in those days, you couldn't group anything together and he would have literally a two by ten, about 6ft long with stacks of orders. Ours were never that big, but we'd have a trading coat with four pockets full of orders. I did the buy side, my father did the sell side, and you'd always keep the downside deck on one side and the upside deck on the other, so you didn't get confused. And then hopefully everything was organized. And we had trading assistance at one time during big markets in the late 80s around the 2000 area, and then whenever there were droughts, we might have as many as four to six trading assistants to just keep track of everything.
[00:06:52] Speaker B: Wow. What was the biggest order that you ever had to fill? Biggest single order you ever had to fill?
[00:07:00] Speaker A: So I got an order from back when the government had release levels and everything like that. I got an order from one commercial for the close that just said, whatever it, uh and at that time, there were some big locals. As a matter of fact, I think on that day, even Tom Neal was standing in there, and as soon as I started to buy on the clothes, he just stepped back. And I knew it was going to be much less difficult to do what I had to do than if he had stood there and just kept saying, sold. So, yeah, that was the biggest order, whatever it takes. And now, up until a short while ago, I was still doing execution. And the spread numbers are absurd.
It's no big deal to get a 3000 lot or 5000 lot spread order in corn. And those numbers didn't used to be around 500 or 1000 and contracts back when we were doing Bushels and you were counting off in millions, 5 million or 10 million was a lot. But think of it, 10 million is only 2000 contracts, and now 3000, 5000 contracts on a spread order.
It's not common, but it's not uncommon.
[00:08:33] Speaker B: Yeah. How difficult was that for you back then when they switched from Bushels to contracts to do the math in your head?
[00:08:43] Speaker A: You know what, actually, I could always do the numbers in my head, so it really wasn't I campaigned against it, but it was a boon. It was because our business increased dramatically when we started doing contracts instead of Bushels. So it was a good thing. Unfortunately, I didn't have when it comes to higher math, that's not me, but I could do the one plus seven, plus twelve, plus 53, plus 87. I could do that.
[00:09:19] Speaker B: Yeah. So what was your education background coming into the exchange experience?
[00:09:27] Speaker A: So for two years after I graduated college, I was at Pricewaterhouse, so I was an accountant, and those were long hours for decent money, but not a lot of money. And after a couple of years, I decided it's like, you know what, I'm going to take a shot at going to the trading floor. And even when things aren't gangbusters, it's still going to be better than what I was doing. So that was my thought process.
[00:09:59] Speaker B: And where did you go to school?
[00:10:01] Speaker A: I went to Notre Dame, where I was fortunate my freshman year. We were football national champions, and when I graduated, we were football national champions. And one time since then, yeah, it was a good time to be there and a great place to go to school.
[00:10:19] Speaker B: And you had a bet with somebody in the corn pit about football. What was that all about?
[00:10:27] Speaker A: Yes. No. Kenny gorgle, who was all American at Purdue and all pro, I believe, at the Cleveland Browns, we used to have a bet every year when Notre Dame played Purdue, that if Purdue won, then I had to wear a Purdue tie in the pit for the rest of the season and vice versa. If Notre Dame won that, he had to wear a Notre Dame tie in the pit the rest of the season, and I think might have started out just for the week after the game, but then eventually there was no thrill in that. Everybody got used to seeing the ties, and we had that every year till Kenny left the floor, who ended up.
[00:11:08] Speaker B: Wearing the others tie more. Do you think so?
[00:11:11] Speaker A: I think during those years that he wore the Notre Dame tie just a little bit more than I wore the Purdue tie. As a matter of fact, I still have a Purdue tie. I'm not sure it's the original Purdue tie. And my wife, as I started to pull things out, just to refresh my memory and to have here just in case, I was surprised at some of the things I found. So having the Purdue tie around and the last trading coat and a variety.
[00:11:41] Speaker B: Of other things, did you have any other bets or things like that on the trading floor?
[00:11:49] Speaker A: At first, the only other significant bet that I remember is when I first got down to the trading floor, george Borbeck, who was the cargill top step broker in the corn pit, and Red Rose, who was everybody's broker in the corn pit. They were going to test me, so I forget who they were. What Notre Dame was playing might have been Nebraska, and it was because that would have been an infrequent game for Notre Dame. And both of them came to me, and at the time, I had just borrowed money to buy my seat, and they both wanted $500 bets. This is in 1979 or 1980 on the Nebraska Notre Dame game. And I thought, well, I can't say no, so I said yes. And I bet both of them. And I was nervous. It's like, wow, things weren't that busy. And I was still trying to pay off my seat. And I got lucky. And I won. And both of them were waiting on the trading floor when I walked on the floor on Monday morning to pay off.
Fast pay means fast friends and everything. And then neither one of them ever bet me again.
So I passed the test, and I got lucky because Notre Dame and I think the game was close. Like, it came down to the last three to five minutes of the game. I'm just thinking, oh, man, I'll go to my grandfather, I'll ask $1,000, but I didn't have to.
[00:13:22] Speaker B: So when you bought your membership in 1979, what did you pay for it, and how did you pay for it.
[00:13:30] Speaker A: So I paid $223,500, I borrowed $200,000 from Continental Bank and I put up a small amount of money on my own. But then my father and grandfather gave me five grand apiece and Bruce Johnson and Bobby Goldberg, old Bruce Johnson, as we say, gave me five grand apiece just so that I started out with a little cash in my pocket. And fortunately I paid off the personal loans fairly shortly.
But at one point because of the timing, I was paying 21% interest on my loan in Continental Bank. And those are times I'll never forget. It's like, oh man, what do I have to do just to break even? It took me a while to pay that off, I think 81 or 82 because it got a little quiet around the Board of Trade at the same time as the interest rates were going up and at least it did in the grains, but got all that taken care of.
[00:14:39] Speaker B: So did you help anybody else come down to the markets? You mentioned you hired some clerks and stuff like that, but did you bring some friends into the markets?
[00:14:53] Speaker A: Fortunately or unfortunately, the commodity markets were not understood and even in the early years, the people who would normally go to Wall Street weren't really interested in even the bond market, even though those guys were killing it over there from fairly early on. So when I thought about this, I had two of my clerks, gina Gio and Bridget McCloy, who, gina Gio went on to be just like a fabulous back office person and Bridget McCoy went on to just knock him dead.
Know, we didn't have to back her or anything, she just decided one day it's like, look, I think I know what and then and that's not a name you'll ever hear. They were both women and women were not like Nancy Gelderman was the only woman. Oh no, there was one other woman on the trading floor and I forget her know, early on that was with John S. Morris and I'm sorry but I don't remember her name, but those were the only people on the floor and Nancy Gelderman was a great trader, she was, so those are the only two people. And a lot of our clerks went on to when they found out that the guys in the bonds were making five times what they were making over the grades, then it's like we got them going and then they moved over. So that was it. But my father was a guy who brought people into the business, guys who are traders, and he was good at knowing who wasn't just going to blow their family's money when they came down on the floor. He had a couple of guys and there's one guy, Ricky Pearson, who was trading from off the floor when it first became fashionable. And I just ran into him a few months ago and he's still trading huge and killing it.
But my dad was the guy who brought those people along so that they knew what they were doing.
[00:17:08] Speaker B: How did the experience of trading on the floor take its toll on you physically?
[00:17:14] Speaker A: You know, what you don't realize until you're done with it when the pressure comes off, what that was like.
And even before there was 20 hours a day trading, you were under pressure. So especially when the markets are active, you have trading risk and error risk, and when the markets aren't active, then you're not making any money. So it was either but you had to look at it like it was either feast or feast. You know, when I started down on the trading floor and I was borrowing all that money to pay for the seat, my grandfather said, he goes, look, kid, he said, you're going to have good years and you're going to have bad years. He said, the only way you're going to survive, and this was when he was 83 years old, said the only way you're going to survive is never spend more than your worst year. He said, don't you see all these guys and at the time, a lot of those guys hadn't found Ferraris and Aston Martins, but they were, know, Corvettes and Cobras and Mercedes and stuff like says don't do, said just, you know, common sense. So that was the best business advice anybody's really ever given.
[00:18:34] Speaker B: There's a question about what was the impact of your family on your decision to work on the trading floor. How did your family react to your decision to come down there? Did they say, welcome, this is a great thing?
[00:18:48] Speaker A: My father and grandfather were obviously welcoming, otherwise that wouldn't have worked. But the other members of the family were afraid that I was going to go down there and just lose whatever everybody had. So they weren't real hot on my grandfather and father having to guarantee the loan at the bank and all the rest of that.
Actually, what happened was so going way back, my grandfather, when the Cashman family wanted to come down on the trading floor, was one of their sponsors for membership for Gene Cashman and the other Cashman family members. So when it came time to borrow the money at the bank, my grandfather called Gene Cashman and know, what do I do? And he said, don't worry about it. And so John Ruth was working for Gene Cashman as well as being an independent businessman. And he had had his background at Harris Bank. And he made a phone call to Continental Bank and all of a sudden I had a loan for a guy with about a $25,000 net worth. Had a loan for $200,000 to buy a Board of Trade seat.
And then when I first came down and they said, well, what are you going to do? Do you want to trade? Do you want to fill orders? What do you want to do? And I tried trading for about a day and a half, and I said, maybe I should try the filling orders thing.
And that worked, obviously, because we're here.
[00:20:18] Speaker B: Yeah, well, you know, Tom Cashman was a mentor of mine and how I got down to the markets, and John Ruth was a partner of his. And Victor Grain, John was is a dear friend and mentor of mine, as he because he was the Harris banker and John McPartland was the Continental banker back in those.
[00:20:48] Speaker A: I whenever I run into any of his sons, I go, you know what, I thank them. I still thank them. I go, you realize I wouldn't have know what success I've had if it wasn't for your father. And I tell John Ruth to say I tell him, thank know, if we ran into each other down in Florida, I'd say thank you, because those are things you're not supposed to.
Yeah.
[00:21:14] Speaker B: If you could start all over again and do this, would there be anything that you would change?
[00:21:22] Speaker A: So I thought about that, and there were like, two inflection points where I chose to do what I did when I was just graduating college. And I think Dan Rice was still alive. Anyway, while Dan Rice was still alive, my grandfather knew Dan Rice really well. And we ran into DF, as everybody calls him, in the parking garage, and he introduced me to Dan Rice, and he said, DF, what do you think? Should we bring him down to the board of trade? And Dan Rice said, send them over to the Merck.
And at that time, the Merck was the seats were cheaper, and they were just starting to come up. Leo and Jack were just starting to have an impact, but I chose not to. It's like, no, I'm going to go where my family is. And then when John Ruth was with the said, you know, it's going to get quiet in the grains for a long time, what are you going to do? And the bonds were just starting to open, and they're not a good friend, but I knew John Gilmore, and so there were opportunities there, and I decided not to do know. I said, you know what? I'm concerned about the cyclicality of the markets, and these guys are on a tear, and I'm going to move over there at the peak and then watch things fall off. And if there's anything that anybody who's been around our markets knows is there are ebbs and flows. So that was the second point where it's like, okay, things would have been different if I'd have made choices differently then. But I'm quite satisfied because a lot of the guys with the big bond money don't have the big bond money anymore, and a lot of the CME guys sold their stock at $27 or whatever it was. So it's like, okay, I think we're okay being a cornbroker and then the other business interest that we had was a good choice.
[00:23:40] Speaker B: Charlie Carey had gone over to the Merck for a while. When did you first meet Charlie Carey?
[00:23:46] Speaker A: Oh, very early on.
Let's see.
The time I really got to know Charlie Carey was around the Russian green Embargo.
And after that we've known each other for forever.
I'm sure when they were deciding which directors to take over to the CME, I made it on somebody's list. So probably that had something to do with it. And then when I was on the Nominating committee, when we nominated Charlie to be chairman and a lot of know, as you can well imagine, had different opinions. And so they'd be on the trading floor and go, what are you?
And I said, you know what? I go, Charlie's a fabulous said and he's a smart businessman because he knows what he doesn't know and he knows who to call and find out. And I said, that's the guy you want running this place, not somebody who thinks they know everything.
And I think that turned out to be right.
[00:25:02] Speaker B: Interesting.
What caused you to stop trading on the floor?
[00:25:08] Speaker A: So I just stopped when they closed it for COVID. I was on the trading floor till the last day, and then I was up in an office until they moved people into booth space on the financial trading floor. And my routine when the grain floors were open was to have breakfast with a group of traders and other brokers every morning so you could find out what was going on. And everybody seemed to know something that not everybody else knew.
And so even during that brief period after they closed the border trade floor, before they made the booth space available, I missed that. Buz you can look at podcasts, you can look at pay for information services and all that, but the buzz that you used to get from just sitting and chatting with people, artificial AI will have a tough time replacing that, I think.
Matter of fact, one of the things, one of the artifacts that I was looking for was I was one of the first guys to sign up for Project A. That's how far back I go in electronic trading. I embraced that from very early on. And when David Downey from Timber Hill wanted to put his order entry system on the trading floor, I agreed to do it, even though that was an unpopular choice at that time, because we didn't have the electronic order entry. And everybody thought that people know, the locals thought they were going to get picked off by people that had superior access. They didn't have to call a trading desk and have the guy handwrite an order and send it in and delay and things like that. So that was extremely unpopular. But electronic trading, I have the screens up. Even if I'm on a day I'm not trading, I still look at the screens just to see what's going on.
[00:27:09] Speaker B: Where would you have breakfast?
[00:27:12] Speaker A: You know what? Most of the time, like, once a week we'd be down in Series, but most of the time we were in the members lounge and we had Jesse, the little cook up there who knew everybody wanted for breakfast. And it was better than having a private club.
And then we'd go down to series once a week.
But we had a great group of guys, a couple of old commercial traders, some guys who were the Bolowski brothers who worked for Gelderman, who talked to everybody, and Steve Bruce, who was a Gelderman guy, too, at one time with the Illinois Co op and other places before that. So for me it was ideal. It's like, okay, everybody's already talked to somebody. Now I'll find out what's going on.
[00:28:08] Speaker B: Did you used to go to Orlando's back in the day?
[00:28:13] Speaker A: I don't think so. We'd go to the Union League Club from time to time and we'd go to whatever the place is now over in the insurance exchange. I forget.
Yes, right. But mostly the bowling's restaurant.
[00:28:32] Speaker B: Yeah. Orlando's was Billy Asimos's dad's.
[00:28:39] Speaker A: Right. Okay.
[00:28:39] Speaker B: That was where Billy goat was.
And that's where I used to have breakfast with a bunch of traders. There was a big round table that a bunch of traders would come in and kind of come and go from. Dan Henning used to be at the table, and Paul Gotchin and Tom Cashman, of course, would bring me, and there'd just be a whole bunch of different traders. That would be interesting experience.
[00:29:11] Speaker A: And our crowd would shift from time to time. We'd have guys come in and then guys drop off. But it was still a group of five to sometimes ten trade, locals, commercial guys, everything. But it was great. It was ideal.
And my wife doesn't understand that now that I'm kind of landlocked it's like, okay, it's time for breakfast. But it's 630 in the morning.
It's time for breakfast.
Where do you want to go? I want to go back to bed. That kind of deal.
[00:29:49] Speaker B: So what are your favorite memories from the trading floor?
[00:29:53] Speaker A: Oh, boy. The Camaraderie. Even guys that you get in the shouting matches with over getting passed over on a trade, you thought, or vice versa, they thought you passed over them on a trade and things like that. I have a story about Miles Kerrigan, and Miles was a great guy. He was always very kind to my grandfather. But somehow or another, at one point, he thought that I had passed over him on a trade, the big trade, and he stopped talking to me, and then he stopped trading with me. And then this went on for a period of time. And finally one day when it was really busy and I kind of needed him, I walked over and I said, Look, Miles, I know you're giving me the silent treatment. I said, and you Irish guys think that's a big deal, that it carries on for days, weeks, months, maybe a couple of years or something like that. I said, but I'm married to a Sicilian Italian woman. I said, they hold grudges past the 30th reincarnation. I go, you got nothing, you got nothing. And he smirked.
And then later that day, he started trading with me again.
So that's what the crowd was like. Even people that you disagreed with, board of Trade politics or CME politics, there was always common ground.
Things always worked out. The collegiality there was unmatched, probably any.
[00:31:31] Speaker B: Know, the stories I always heard or things we would see, know, people getting into people's faces. And then you go for a beer afterward, after work, and you're best of friends again.
[00:31:44] Speaker A: Yeah. And it didn't take long. Just didn't take long. Okay.
Yeah. And it was like that way forever, pretty much. That was not people you had vehement disagreements with, you could always talk to.
[00:32:00] Speaker B: How about your worst memories from the trading floor?
[00:32:04] Speaker A: Wow.
I tried to think of that, and maybe I've kind of glossed over everything. So the the only things I can think of the worst memories of the trading floor was the, you know, the, the 87 crash and 911, because I was on the trading floor for both those events, and that was fear.
That was bad. And obviously the crash. Where else are you going to be? But I had just gotten out of the car to go to the trading floor when I heard that the first tower had been hit. And then as I'm standing on the trading floor, they had the big screens, and they showed the second tower get hit, and it's like, oh, my God, what's going to happen?
I had a family, then I had kids, and it's like, uhoh, time to go.
But business wise, as long as you were good for your word on the trading floor, you never had a long term problem with anybody. You never had a problem that couldn't be resolved with the trading houses or with the clearing firms or with the other traders. That was it.
As long as you weren't lying, then as long as you were straight with everybody, then everything could be worked.
That was I never had an issue that could be resolved and wasn't resolved.
[00:33:43] Speaker B: Amicably what was it like to work on the trading floor and to be a member of the Chicago Board of Trade?
[00:33:56] Speaker A: So for me, it was a big deal.
And the rest of the world, when I told college classmates what I was doing, they go, oh, you got to give me a good stock pick when you come up with one. And that was it for the longest time. And until the funds came into the commodities markets and people started, oh, yeah, I just bought the commodity fund. I just invested in Deutsche Bank's commodity fund. Or I did that, what should it's like? Most people didn't know what it was like, but for me, that was like the CME and the CBOT. And then eventually the CBOE were Chicago royalty for a long were a lot of people were like me where it was difficult to get in unless you knew somebody or had family in the you know, there were a lot of kids asking for it's. You know, can you get my cousin a work job down on the trading floor and all this? So in Chicago that was a big then, you know, even in the fancier neighborhoods on the North Shore, in Barrington, in Hinsdale, in flossmore and all those places, I would think up until a certain point that the majority of the fancy houses were owned by people in the business or related to the business. There were doctors and lawyers and all the rest of that. But this was Chicago's equivalent of Wall Street. LaSalle street was the Chicago Wall Street. And so that was a big deal. I was always proud of it. I'm still proud.
[00:35:37] Speaker B: What was the economic opportunity like down on the trading floor?
[00:35:44] Speaker A: So the markets always changed, so things changed, the opportunities came and went because somebody would figure out what you were doing and how to take advantage of that. And even when you were trading electronically, there were programs that would figure out what you were doing and try to take advantage of that. So you had to constantly adjust your trading style, not necessarily reinvent yourself because the best thing you could do was recognize that what you were doing wasn't working anymore. And now it's time to do something different.
And it's not just a question of trading corn spreads or bean spreads or trading the bonds or trading the bitcoin or whatever it is. It's like how you do it and what your tolerance for risk is.
There was a group that I was involved with there's, a partner over at the CBOE, and literally 15 to 20 years ago we had guys from MIT at Caltech trying to program trading programs and even back then they had Hunter killer programs and all they did was try to exploit the weaknesses of everybody else's trading program. So unless you changed what you were doing, they were going to pick your pockets. So going back to my grandfather, the second good piece of advice he gave me is don't ever quit your day job no matter what you think it's like, okay. And I was a partner in trading groups over at the CBOE and then did some other things, but I never quit my day job. And that was also excellent advice because even your best outside investments can ebb and flow too. So you have to be able to adapt.
I like to think that's what I did.
[00:37:49] Speaker B: Looking at it from a historical standpoint, who did the best between your grandfather, your father and you?
[00:37:59] Speaker A: You know what, it was just my grandfather got us in the door.
He knew everyone, and everyone knew him, and he always had a solid reputation, and it was the same thing with my dad, and he moved the bar up, and I like to think that I moved the bar up maybe a little more. So I think everybody did really well. I still own my grandfather's seat that he bought in 1929. And even though there's been an ebb and flow in that, again, don't quit your day job. So we'll see how that turns out.
[00:38:38] Speaker B: Do you remember what your best day as a broker was like?
[00:38:45] Speaker A: So best day as a broker, as a matter of fact, I used to save the clearing sheets from the overnights that shows the out trades, and I had those in my office at home, and my wife made me throw them out. She goes, those days are over with.
But that was an ever changing metric, because when at one point, if you were filling 2000 contracts and you're getting paid $2 a contract, then that was a huge day. And then if you're filling 10,000 contracts and you're getting paid $0.85, it doesn't have the same impact.
Like I said, the guys now that do 3005 thousand spreads, if you do have a few days like that, it doesn't take a lot.
Although there are guys doing that for execution at $0.17. So that's not the jackpot that it used to be.
[00:39:45] Speaker B: Do you remember what your worst day was like?
[00:39:48] Speaker A: So I had probably several worst days, just mistakes days. You're off your game. But they were never catastrophic.
And I was fortunate because we were allowed to dual trade, and then by trading, you could always work back.
You didn't have to wait for the brokerage to pay for the error. You could put some spreads on or get long or get short or whatever. And there were ways to ameliorate that.
I saw that on your list of questions, and I'm thinking, even when I had a really bad day, I'd walk off the floor going, we'll get it back tomorrow, we'll get it back this week, or we'll get it back, whatever.
[00:40:45] Speaker B: You never blew out or came close to blowing out.
[00:40:49] Speaker A: I'm knocking on the table here. No, again, it's just common sense. You have an error, you don't turn an error into a trade.
It's like, okay, get out, make sure you can cover it. And that was always not a problem.
And most of the firms now, as a matter of fact, I was talking to Joe Guinan and Tim Tui at Advantage about continuing to do execution, and they know you're a good guy and everything, and they said yes. But then I had lunch with a guy who was still doing execution, who had an error that at one point was a million $250,000 in one day.
I went back to Tim Tui and Joe guy, I said, you know, maybe I'm rethinking that execution part again because that would be a catastrophic error, but fortunately I've not encountered that myself.
[00:42:04] Speaker B: I used to work for Bud Frazier and he was famous for just putting in open orders in the market to scratch trades that were errors. And he did that one time with like a four lot in the S and P and it turned into an $80,000 loss before he finally gave up and just covered it.
[00:42:27] Speaker A: Right.
[00:42:29] Speaker B: And then every morning he would get his runners on the floor in a line and he would make them repeat, I will never trade S PS. I will never trade oh.
[00:42:43] Speaker A: Bud Fraser was a great guy. Great guy. And Fraser Parrot, we did business for Know for a long time and Ralph and Wayne and Steve Gunning and all those guys.
That was a good group of people.
[00:42:59] Speaker B: To deal with from a market perspective. Were you a bull or a bear and why were you one or the other?
[00:43:10] Speaker A: So I was always bullish, I always thought, and my father was always bearish, and the only thing I can think of was I was the buy side broker and I always wanted it to be buying and obviously he chose the sell side, but he was always bearish.
And a lot of times, even in bear markets, my way of making money would be you'd buy a dip but not buy it big. You not commit to a big position and then take a two or three cent winner and that's it. That's good, I'm good, I'm done. And not buy 200,000 bushels or 500,000 bushels and hang on to it even though it's going against you. Don't do that's again. Maybe that's why I'm still here.
But I'm still bullish except on the stock market. I think that's going to about someplace, yeah.
[00:44:15] Speaker B: Tom Cashman told Know that he was always a bull, and of course his Uncle Gene was a notorious bull.
But Bill Mallor SR. Told me a story one time about how he was very confused about the market one time, and so he decided to go talk to Gene. And so he walked over to the bean oil pit and he's like, Gene, I don't understand this market at all. It got me totally confused. And Gene's like he goes, Me too. He goes, I don't have a thing on goes, I don't know what to do with this market. He goes, I don't have a position at all except for the 200 bean oil that I'm long because he was always long.
[00:45:03] Speaker A: There were a lot of guys like that who it's like, oh, yeah, except for my main position, just my standard thing, right?
[00:45:11] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:45:12] Speaker A: But that was not me. I'm flattening the grains right now. And I was wildly bullish and would have been okay the last couple of days. But it's been trying, as they say.
[00:45:30] Speaker B: Do you remember what the biggest position was that you ever took in the markets from a personal standpoint.
[00:45:39] Speaker A: Especially when I cleared myself, it was probably just 200 contracts outright and maybe 500 spreads in the grains and nothing near that in the financials.
A long time ago, Tom Neal told me, he said, you don't have enough on unless you wake up in the middle of the night screaming.
And that was Tom Neal. It's like, seriously? I said, I don't think I'm ever going to get to that point. He goes, okay, that's fine, but I just thought I'd tell uh, he was a great guy.
[00:46:18] Speaker B: Yeah. So did you ever use options in your trading at?
[00:46:23] Speaker A: My, my problem with options was even though I backed options groups over to CBOE for decades, was that I didn't fully understand all the intricate mechanics of options. Every time I put on options positions, either in conjunction with futures positions or just naked, I'd watch the time decay just kill me. It's like, okay, I'm going to be right, I'm going to be right. But all of a sudden they expire and then the next day the market gaps higher or the market gaps lower depending on what I had on. So again, I backed options groups over at the CBOE with partners for years and fortunately they were much more astute at figuring all that out than I was. And I have small options positions on now, but I told John Cox, I said, I'm the equivalent in the commodities markets of a hobby farmer. I go back in the old days when you used to have on 100 or 200, then that was serious. And now if I have 50 on, I don't sleep at night. So it's like my benchmark position is a five lot now, so it's not the same.
[00:47:47] Speaker B: So there used to be the perspective that the corn pit was very conservative and that they did not like options because they felt that corn options were taking volume away from the futures pit. People would trade futures if there weren't corn options.
Can you comment at all about that? Or was that.
[00:48:12] Speaker A: When they decided they were trying to go to serial options from just the know, expirations? And I said, you can't do that. I said, because you're robbing Peter to pay Paul and that's not right, and all the rest of that. And theoretically the options would have enhanced the market overall. But I think that when it comes right down to it, I think we've seen kind of now ETFs are the way to trade. And I think ETFs, even though they use our markets for hedging, are not necessarily the primary market, but it's the primary plus one market because some of their open interest, some of their net asset values or asset values of money under management is just extreme. So it was me, and I can't think of his last name, but the guy who was really pushing the serial options, I was vehemently opposed to that at the time. And it's just like when they were trying to do the contracts instead of Bushels. It's like, okay, it is what it is. Let's play kind of do you remember.
[00:49:35] Speaker B: What your worst error was? Like.
[00:49:39] Speaker A: You know what, I tried to think of that last night. I mean, it was probably somewhere in the five figures, but not, again, not catastrophic. It's not like I had to call the bank and say, wire more money, not maybe $25,000, something like that.
That's certainly a big enough deal, but not, again, not catastrophic. So I was always like, get my count, get my count, all the rest of that. And then, yeah, I was very fortunate, I guess, to have done that for so long and not done worse than I did. And again, knocking on this wood table.
[00:50:32] Speaker B: Again, I can always remember floor brokers having to write checks for errors on the trading floor. Did you have a checkbook on the trading floor? And how many checks would you go through in a month?
[00:50:47] Speaker A: So not that many.
And again, when it came to houses, you might have to adjust or whatever it is once or twice a year, and then you might owe a guy, a local who got out of something, and then you split it with them or whatever the deal know, so you write a check. But I wrote plenty of checks, or know, when I cleared through Griffin and cleared through Goldberg, I asked for checks enough times, but it's not like I needed a printing press down on the transport to take care of those things.
But I always thought I was fair.
If a local said, oh, I remember that, I'd say, well, okay, either I didn't check it with you or whatever it is, you want to split it, whatever the deal is. And if they knew they were wrong, then they took it. If I knew I was wrong, I'd say, well, in that case, I'll take care of this, and then don't worry about it.
[00:51:56] Speaker B: What were market openings like? And how did you make sure that you filled everything that was within that opening range?
[00:52:05] Speaker A: Yeah, on very busy days, that got to be fairly problematic.
And I was just teasing somebody about I forget who I was talking to about cutting people off. You'd cut off the order flow before the 830 opening, depending on what kind of day it was going to be at quarter after eight or 20 after eight, and say, look, I've got to get account, this is going to be ten to 20 lower, or it's going to be limit down, and I need to count everything. And then you keep an idiot card, and then have your count, just have different benchmarks, and then just keep buying till you got it done and hope that you covered everything and people didn't put out lowballs beneath you. And so that was because of my size. That made it a little easier to make sure nobody was doing anything stupid like going through my bid or going through my offer and just putting out an erroneous print. So that would have been a problem, and it might have been a problem once or twice, but again, usually there was a remedy. Either the market came back and let you fill things one way or the other, or again, you realize it's like, okay, I screwed up. I'll cover this, and I'll adjust it to the customer.
[00:53:37] Speaker B: Yeah.
So I remember brokers with their decks, and they would write on the outside of the orders how many they had at each price with a pencil because they were writing orders or endorsing orders with a pencil. And of course, they had a big eraser because they constantly had to erase, change the number and change it and everything. But then you guys went to Pens. So how did you adjust?
[00:54:10] Speaker A: Then you just crossed out the previous number, and you kept going down the side of the sheet of paper because you were holding it lengthwise. And so on the outside, you had plenty of room to keep change.
[00:54:22] Speaker B: So that wasn't yeah, you kept crossing it out. Okay, cross it out.
[00:54:28] Speaker A: It's like, okay, that's no good anymore. Now it was 115. Now it's 215. Now it's 435. Now it's whatever. And whatever number, you made sure you crossed out one so that you didn't have two numbers and go, okay, which one is it?
The mechanic for that word as sophisticated as maybe people thought.
[00:54:53] Speaker B: So what was the secret to a runner being able to get an order into you, particularly if you were busy?
[00:55:04] Speaker A: So most of the time, we had clerks. The clerks, if it was a market order, then it came straight in, and they'd say, okay, hand it to them, or the clerk would grab it. And then we had some great clerks, and almost depending how busy it was and how much paper there was, they'd start building another deck, and then they'd hand you stuff, or the market was breaking. They'd go, okay, you need to buy 75 here. You need to buy 180 here. You need to buy whatever the number was. And so you just do it. The clerks were invaluable.
When I first started down on the floor, I was clerking. My father went on vacation. And even though I had a membership, I was clerking for Richie Jacowski in the center of the corn pit. So I learned how important clerks and being able to add and subtract and know when to bother somebody and when not to bother somebody, I learned in a big hurry because Richie did not tolerate incompetence. So fortunately, I passed that test, too.
[00:56:18] Speaker B: Yeah.
Well, I was a runner in 1981 for Shearson American Express. And you were one of our brokers in the corn pit.
[00:56:27] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:56:28] Speaker B: And I remember them kind of teaching us that you've got to pretend like it's a big order to get them to take it and then get out of there, then run, then run because they needed you back at the desk to take the next order out.
But if he saw the order and it's just a stop that's away from the market, it'll make you stand there for a minute before he'll take the order.
[00:56:59] Speaker A: No, but then if it was really busy, then I'd turn and scowl at you just so you knew that it was a mistake. Maybe you need to read that.
The I think Tommy Conklin did the buy side, and my father did the sell side on the shearson business. They split it. And Tommy Conklin and Dave.
Crazy Dave. Anyway. Yeah. So that business was split, and for a lot of the time when we were still dealing with paper, there were two brokers. Like, there was Pat McBride and Tuck Sullivan. There was Waldo and Freddie Prozel. There was Tommy Conklin and Dave Young and myself and my dad. And then refco put their own guy in there, tommy Abedicola. And so the center was pretty vibrant. A lot of know, especially as you got into exploration, the top step and all the rest of know, the top step guys were always busier, but we did okay down in the center.
[00:58:17] Speaker B: Yeah. So how about market closes? If somebody traded through you through some orders that you should have gotten filled on the other side of the pit or something like that, back in the day, before they had the legal curb and all that kind of stuff, what was all that like?
[00:58:40] Speaker A: Well, again, as I said before, I said I was big enough so that a lot of times we didn't have any trouble with people. It's like, if you thought you traded through me, then maybe you ought to rethink that.
If there are orders on the other side, then you need to fill my orders because you screwed up or whatever.
I think the openings were much more stressful than the closes close. You had a minute, and it you always tried to do the best for your customer. It's like if you were buying it, you wanted to buy it near the bottom of the closing range, and if you were selling it, you wanted to sell it near the top of the closing range. But if you had a big number, you didn't try to finesse it, you just filled it. You did it. And if you had significant enough resting orders on either side that were sized, you made sure that the whole world knew that you were there.
So that was just part of the technique, kind of. It's like, okay, and that's survival. That's not any better or any worse than anybody else. It's just like, okay, if you want to put out an 80 quote, and I've still got 500 to sell at 79, you better make my 79 good or your 80 quote doesn't go.
[01:00:02] Speaker B: That's it.
Did you ever get caught legging a spread and get caught on the close where you didn't get the other side?
[01:00:13] Speaker A: Yeah. But then hopefully you weren't doing anything stupid like 100 or 200, and then you're long or short and you get out of it. That's all?
[01:00:24] Speaker B: Yeah.
Tom Cashman told me in his interview that his best trade ever was on a spread he was filling, that he didn't get filled on the leg the other side and wrote it all the way up.
[01:00:44] Speaker A: That's great. That's a good story.
[01:00:49] Speaker B: So how about when the trading pit was slow, what did you do? Did you leave the pit or take a break?
[01:00:59] Speaker A: I tried not to, especially when we were still in like 930 to 115. It's like 3 hours and 45 minutes.
Can you make it?
But the 830 thing, I would read every newspaper that there was or try to keep track of what was going on in other markets or just go around and talk to people and see what's going on. So that was the best thing about being on the trading floor with another thousand or whatever the number was one, 8000 hundred other people is. There was always somebody to talk to. And whether it was about golf or business or whatever, then it was a great place. It really was a great place.
[01:01:49] Speaker B: What was it like to interact with the other brokers in the pit? Did you ever trade broker to broker if you had to? Or was it mostly you working with the locals?
[01:02:03] Speaker A: Oh, no. A lot of times, especially in the opening, because the locals if I hit market making orders or somebody else had market making orders, then you're almost forced to trade with them because their size is going to take out your size, and there's nobody else who's going to make a market that knows where that stuff is coming out.
But you never favored brokers. You never favored locals. You just traded.
If everybody was the same, then you tried to split it up. And if somebody had made the market or somebody was in the process of making the market, then you traded with them.
That was the local protocol. That's it.
And whether it was a broker or local, if they made the market and you didn't trade with them, then you heard about it. So it wasn't worth not, you know, unless you weren't paying attention.
That seldom happened.
[01:03:14] Speaker B: Yeah.
Okay.
Did you see any illegal practices on the trading floor when you were down there?
[01:03:26] Speaker A: No.
There might have been some bridge table talk kind of things, but not illegal. There weren't guys transferring money to their buddy or anything like that.
Otherwise, at some point you owed it to either go have a little chat with them or if they didn't understand what they were doing was wrong, then you needed to tell somebody else. But now the corn pit was 99.9%.
[01:04:02] Speaker B: Straight up I remember there was the guy that used to do the corn wheat spreads that got nailed for oh, yes, right, yeah.
[01:04:14] Speaker A: Well, because he had his sister doing the other side or some relatives doing the other side. Yes, right.
To tell you the truth, when it came to that, I was kind of naive. It's like, oh, she's got something on it, but all of a sudden she's over in the corn pit trading and he's doing the whatever.
But again, I was naive. I didn't understand that she had an edge that whatever.
[01:04:50] Speaker B: How about great deeds on the trading floor?
People helping each other out, somebody that blew out or somebody that had a medical emergency or raising money for a charity?
[01:05:07] Speaker A: That happened all the time. There's no more beneficial crowd than that crowd.
It was a great place for people to panhandle outside of because they knew all the board of trade guys. And I'm sure the same thing at the Mark. Those guys were carrying cash.
And then if somebody had an issue, there were people around to help them if they were good guys. So that happened all the time. And then everybody if there was a charity or somebody that somebody needed help with or something like that, a lot of that was just unspoken. It's just part of, again, the collegiality down there. It's like, okay, not that you take care of your own, but you make sure that you share with the people that need it.
And that was 100% of the time. That was never an issue.
[01:06:20] Speaker B: So what life lessons did you learn on the trading floor?
[01:06:28] Speaker A: Yeah, countless. Countless.
It's just treat others the same way you want to be treated. Otherwise you're going to get it full force. So you can't be a hard ass as part of your moniker. You can't just be that way.
That's an easy life lesson. It's like, okay, if you don't want people jumping all over you, then just show kindness and courtesy towards everybody. Even when all heck is breaking loose, it's like, okay, you do what you can do.
Again, everybody was generous down there in different ways.
So, you know, Gene Cashman helped me get started through John Ruth and then all that stuff. It's like everybody's paying it forward for forever because there wasn't a time that somebody didn't run into a bump in the road where you needed help and it might not be anybody that you helped, but somebody else will step up. That's the way it was.
[01:08:00] Speaker B: Yeah. I mean, I know that your father and your grandfather were certainly mentors to you. Who were some of your other mentors down there on the trading?
[01:08:14] Speaker A: So politically, Jerry Mann tremendous mentor when it came to just understanding the politics and the business of the business and very smart, very delightful gentleman. And even now we still have conversations and it's amazing in just, you know, kind of other life lessons and then there's one guy know, at a distance I learned from but then became friends with was Bruce Williams.
There's no more straight up trader who just tremendous just to admire him. Just a great guy.
So those three again, when not that I needed a favor, but I was trying to do something. Tim Tui and Joe Guinen and advantage are great guys. They're in the realm of very good, very great people in the business.
[01:09:41] Speaker B: When you first were in the corn pit, who were some of the big traders that you looked to? Oh, wow.
[01:09:50] Speaker A: Yeah.
Also, when I first started out and I thought of this last night, and I just remembered it now, I filled a stop order that shouldn't have been triggered, and Barry Goodman of Goodman Mannister was a big trader, and I had to go back to him and go, Barry, I wasn't supposed to fill that. And he screamed at me for about 10 seconds, and he goes, okay, forget it.
And that was a lesson I never forgot.
It's like, okay, I don't know what that cost him, but it's like I weaned myself on Barry Goodman, but I again learned a lesson. It's like, okay, that's part of the deal here. It's like, okay, then start over.
And then Bob Martin was a huge bean trader and then came over the corn pit and just did know, did everything. Huge trader. Early times. I don't remember anybody. Oh, Jimmy Gelderman early on when I was filling orders for Drexel Burnham and had a million or two I think he did the single largest trade while we were still doing Bushels.
I had 3 million to buy on a single order, and somebody there was an offer of 100, and I took 100. Then I bid for 2,000,009 and Jimmy Gelderman said, sold.
And those were the days when 2,000,009 was just an unheard of number.
And I said, Jimmy, 2,000,009. He goes, yeah, I heard you. Okay, so interesting guy. He's still around. I'm pretty sure he's done a lot of different things.
So Jimmy Gelderman, Bob Martin. Who else? Don Hurr used to be a huge spread trader. Miles Kerrigan was a huge spread trader, but outright TJ Tom Johnson from the SIBO, and he used to be just huge. And then in later years, Dab Zidoran Ditzy, and he would do any size, anytime.
And I'm sure he carried limit positions constantly.
So those were big guys, really big guys.
[01:12:45] Speaker B: Who did you really have a lot of respect for as a fellow broker that was really doing it right in the corn pit?
[01:12:57] Speaker A: Boy, there weren't a lot of people that I didn't have respect for in one way or know, or at least when I first got there, I felt I had to earn their respect, but was an interesting crowd.
So the guy who was probably the best was Jimmy Warning, who would fill outrights and spreads, and he carried limit positions, too, and was. Really good at all of them and good family guy and just a good guy, and he was very good at what he did.
[01:13:45] Speaker B: When did you get involved in exchange politics?
[01:13:50] Speaker A: So I started with the committees fairly early on. I was on the Market Report Committee because I had worked for the Market Report Department in high school and college from the day I bought my membership.
But the Market Report Committee, well, back then, the Market Report Committee had some things to say about the way quotes were disseminated and all the rest of that. So that would have been in 1980 ish 81, 82. And then again, I used to talk to everybody all the time and talk to Tom Cashman who was on the Board of directors, talked to Dan Henning, talked to Charlie Carey, talked to Ralph Goldberg, talked know, all the older guys. And then I forget what the impetus was to run for the Board of directors. It was just like, okay, it's not that I thought the place was being run poorly, it's just I thought, you know what, I'm a broker who has a decent education, I think I have something to add kind of deal.
And the first time I ran, I handed out gum with Vote for JLP sticker on the side of it because my grandfather used to hand out gum and Halls meant the liptus for everybody. So that was just kind of the family.
And actually, I think Dan Henning came in just outside of the election. I think it was Dan Henning and he, you know, that's know, I get my time back now. So it was very interesting.
[01:15:45] Speaker B: Do you remember how many votes you got?
[01:15:48] Speaker A: No, I don't, but it wasn't necessarily close. It was because there were other people not campaigning for me, but speaking in favor of me.
That's a good question. No idea.
I'm sure there's a piece of paper with that sitting someplace in my office here. But I've consolidated. I had an office for longwood trading with Griffin and then Rand, and then I had an office over at the SIBO for Cassandra and had both those offices are know, I always had kind of a home office. So all that stuff is consolidated in one place. Looks like that's why we're doing this interview in this room and not in my office.
[01:16:46] Speaker B: What was your opinion of the idea of merging with the Merck? Where did you fall with all of that?
[01:16:57] Speaker A: Yeah, as long as they made it worth their while to a certain extent and didn't try to buy us too cheap, then I was in favor of it. I thought the merger. So I had been on the Board of Trade Board and then off, and then I was on the Clearing Corporation Board, and then I was on the Nominating committee, and then I got elected back to the Board of Trade Board.
And so that's when the merger took place. My second run on the Board of Trade board. And again, in theory, I thought it was a great idea. It was just the mechanics. Okay, how do you do it? And I went over and I talked to Jack Sander. I didn't talk to Terry Duffy because Charlie was best friends with Terry Duffy, probably still is, and talked to Jack Sander. And Jack said, oh, yeah, this is great for is. He was a great jack could and he had enough energy for a dozen people.
Interesting guy.
[01:18:09] Speaker B: Yeah.
Ours was one of the last interviews, I think, or maybe the last interview that he did.
[01:18:16] Speaker A: Wow.
Yeah. I was shocked to see that he passed away with COVID Shocked. He's always in such great health.
[01:18:24] Speaker B: You mentioned a couple of different businesses. Can you tell me about the different businesses that you've been involved with outside of your open outcry brokerage business?
[01:18:35] Speaker A: Right. So I had a couple of guys who were SIBO guys who'd been corn traders, who went back to the SIBO and started trading groups, backing trading groups and proprietary trading over there. And so I went over there and I looked at it, and it's like, okay, this is something I don't know a lot about.
I'll be a small investor and see how this works. And then as time went on, then had a little bit more involvement with them.
And it was fun. It was good. It was a good group of guys.
Again, there were ebbs and flows over there.
We'd have great Christmas parties at the fanciest restaurants and then have great Christmas parties doing bagels in the back of the office. So it's like every other trading business, it's cyclical.
[01:19:40] Speaker B: That was longwood.
[01:19:42] Speaker A: No longwood was at the Board of Trade. I had my own clearing at the Board of, uh, but at the CBOE, it was Sparta and Cassandra. Okay, somebody else picked those names. Not me. That's not.
[01:19:59] Speaker B: You said you were one of the first traders on Project A.
How have you used electronic trading as it's developed over the years?
[01:20:15] Speaker A: Maybe that's why I got invited into the sivo thing, because those guys were a lot more advanced electronically than the Board of Trade and the Merck were. So I still do the trading equivalent of Hunt and know, I point and click and I do things I don't let the machine trade for, though, you know, the SIBO guys with the auto quote and all the rest of that. A lot of what they do, even when they're making trading decisions, is much more automated than what we do. But I've embraced electronic trading forever, and even as a hobby, it's probably not as much fun as it used to be. As an know, it's kind of like the difference between watching an action, like watching Mission Impossible and watching the Barbie movie.
Mission Impossible is when you're doing everything, trading different commodities and putting big positions on. And this is more like now okay, it's not a distraction, but again, I said it's the hobby farm equivalent of commodity trading.
[01:21:27] Speaker B: The open outcry markets at the CME are seeing a little bit of a renaissance in the sofa options.
Really.
I recently did a podcast about this. Before the Pandemic, they were doing about 47% with the euro dollar options, and when they restarted, they were doing about 50%, just about. And since then they've gotten up to about 68%, 64, 68%. And part of it has to do with the introduction or expansion of some software that some brokers developed down on the floor called Smart Confirm that allows you to confirm the orders to the customer much faster and to process them through clearing much faster than the regular process.
[01:22:31] Speaker A: Right. Well, that was our problem, is that we couldn't do the allocations fast enough and that was creating regulatory issues. So it's like, okay, then we either change our style of trading, which was not a good thing, or just let somebody else do this. So that's a good thing. And SIBO, they have a trading mean. Santelli still broadcasts from there from time to time.
And I watch that and I see a couple of familiar faces, but a lot of not familiar faces. So there are new people doing that.
And a lot of what they do, even though it lends itself to electronic execution, it's much more sophisticated. It's easier to negotiate with face to face training.
[01:23:23] Speaker B: What's your opinion of the future of open outcry at this point and how long do you think that it has in terms of a future?
[01:23:34] Speaker A: So I personally think that the agricultural options and all that stuff should have been left on the floor when they reopened the floor again, because a lot of those are more sophisticated customers. They're looking for flexibility in the way they structure trades. And a lot of times the trades they try to do require programming for a computer, even if it's simple programming. But the face to face can execute that with the flick of a hand. So I'm not sure that that's all gone yet. And even though with artificial intelligence now, they, you know, a lot of these decisions are going to be made. Well, we've been trading against trading programs for decades here, so if there are still people like me doing hunt and peck or guys like Ditzy who are still taking massive positions s, then I still think that face to face trading, however you want to characterize it, still has a place.
It's not the top of the mountain, but it certainly has a place in transferring risk. So.
