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early 1980’s as a stock jobber with Smith Brothers
amid the hustle and bustle of the London Stock
Exchange floor, those market makers that held shares
on their own books, creating market liquidity by
buying and selling securities and matching investor
orders through their brokers.
He was part of that cadre of pre-Big Bang stock
jobbing firms that made their name on the exchange
floor throughout the first half of the decade before
the seismic deregulation of the UK trading landscape
in 1986.
Smith Brothers, later known as Smith New Court,
was acquired by US investment bank Merrill Lynch
in 1995 for $900 million and Miller departed the firm
after the move away from the trading floor to the
screen-filled offices, predominately trading smaller
companies. After 12 years with the business, Miller
took on a completely new challenge with an upstart
exchange that aimed to take on the very venue where
he cut his teeth in trading.
“The fact that we have seen this proliferation
of trading venues and styles has meant that
we’ve had to keep very much on the forefront
of technology, more than anything else.”
Markets old and new
While there have been a number of misguided and
aborted attempts to acquire or merge with the Lon-
don Stock Exchange over the last 25 years, there has
never been a UK-based challenger that has seriously
threatened the historic institution’s position.
That was the aim of Tradepoint Investment
Exchange, an electronic, pan-European venue that
offered investors access to UK blue chip shares, led
by a group of ex-LSE employees, including the chief
executive officer, Michael Waller-Bridge, father
of the BAFTA and Emmy-award winning actress,
Phoebe Waller-Bridge. “She was probably about three
years old when all of this took place, but she has gone
on to better things as well,” Miller jokes.
“I was market controller of Tradepoint for most
of its life,” he explains. “It was kept alive by the
establishment to encourage order book trading, it
was open to all market participants, although it was
34 // TheTrade // Winter 2019