dealing in fixed income securities and
getting quotes in 1/64ths, 1/8ths or
1/4s my mental arithmetic definitely
improved!
The market was full of characters and
a microcosm of society. There was
plenty of fun, including watching one
of the older members on the floor
practicing hitting a rolled up bit of
paper with his new golf clubs, only to
take a massive divot out of the newly-
laid cushion floor that had only been
laid the previous weekend. Four years
later when the floor closed the divot
was still there!
At the beginning of 1986 I moved
through to Edinburgh to help set up
the dealing desk. In the October of
that year I experienced the advent
of Big Bang, then the demise of the
floor-based market followed by the
beginning of screen-based trading.
Whilst this speeded up trading and
volumes massively increased, so too
did volatility and in the following year
28
easier, also being able to see IOIs rather
than only posting them. I couldn’t
believe how
easy this side
Prices couldn’t be changed quickly enough, the
was. Well in the
yellow strip (best bid and offer), wasn’t yellow
and telephones weren’t answered. You ended up first few weeks I
calling a market maker whose bid was way lower thought that!!
We developed
than anyone else because they might at least
an OMS (initially
answer the phone and when they did the price
from Lotus Notes
was probably that anyway!
then eventually
moved to a
vendor-based product) rather than
Twelve years later I moved to the buy
paper tickets, direct lines to virtually
side at Aegon (now Kames) where
every broker, and we had both
Adrian Fitzpatrick had recently joined
Bloomberg and Reuters, but the
and was building a centralised dealing
process was virtually the same, except
team. The move from poacher to
I had to input the trade details so my
game keeper turned out to be fairly
typing had to improve. The biggest
straightforward!
change for me was getting my head
Instead of speaking to the jobber/
around the fact Aegon traded any
market maker it was now the sales
regulated market you could find. For
trader who wanted to be your best
the previous 17 years I had only ever
friend. That made the transition fairly
easy - when you were a broker XYZ was dealt in the UK, and maybe the odd
trade in IBM or Large cap European
maybe in a 100K, but the size that was
stock. That was a real eye opener but
made to a “proper client” was 3 or 4
great fun at the same time. Also the
times bigger so that made things a lot
size of the business was much larger
than I had previously experienced,
rather than getting the last quarter or
half, to pay a research bill, I traded the
full order, and that could possibly take
a few weeks to execute.”
not only did we have the Hurricane
but the crash of ’87.
www.buysideintel.com
Spring 2018