Anxiety, adrenaline and automation
I’ve seen this guy speak at an Institutional Trading Conference – he was very good and provided some great insight into how floors worked then, and now. Also that the lack of experience on floors these days will invariably lead to more flash crashes in the future. Nice to see him focussing on process and discipline.
I am delighted to introduce a guest blog by Kevin Rodgers, formerly global head of foreign exchange at Deutsche Bank, with an impressive career in trading. Kevin is also the author of a great new book which charts the major changes in investment banking ‘Why aren’t they shouting?’, not to mention a pretty good opera singer.
Mark Fenton-O’Creevy
My first anxiety dreams came to me within a couple of weeks of starting my career on a trading floor and were about an almost laughably trivial worry – whether I could operate the bank’s pricing software. It was 1990, I was at Merrill Lynch and, fresh out of business school, my job as a junior options trader in the bank’s Foreign Exchange (FX) trading team meant making prices using a tool called FENICS. Replete with knowledge gleaned from business school finance classes, I understood what I was doing but the physical…