After a stint in the U.S. Army and a finance degree, Bill Dudley was hired on the bond desk of Merrill Lynch. He was not a trader, but an assistant who went for coffee. Dudley talks about the bond market and how it worked before the advent of futures and how he became one of the first people in Chicago to arbitrage between the futures and the cash bond markets. Dudley talked about how difficult it was for anyone other than a primary dealer to short bonds or Ginnie Maes. He tells the story about how Chicago’s futures markets narrowed the bid offer spread in the New York led cash bond markets. His best trade was a loss of $500,000 and he talks about nearly losing everything on a commercial paper trade. Dudley helped a lot of traders get started over the years at Paine Webber and Kidder Peabody.
KENNY POLCARI – OPEN OUTCRY TRADERS HISTORY PROJECT PART 2
When Kenny Polcari started out at the New York Stock Exchange, “It was paper and pencil until the turn of the century,” he said. The exchange started to introduce handheld computers in the late 1990s, but it was only in beta, not full blown yet. Everyone was...
