I take it that computer testing of systems was not part of your job, since you did it on weekends. What were you actually hired to do? During the week, my normal Clark Kent type job was to load new rolls of paper onto the Reuters machine
when the margin turned pink. I was also responsible for tearing off the news in strips and hanging them up on the
wall behind the machine. The trick was to tear between line-feeds so as to get a smooth edge. The funny thing was
that hardly anyone would read the news since they'd have to lean way over the machine to see the pages. So I
started reading the news and personally delivering it to the brokers. One bonus of this job was that I got to observe a
lot of brokers' trading styles.
Your official position sounds like a glorified office boy. Why did you accept such a menial job? Because I knew I wanted to be in the business, and I didn't care what I did, or what I got paid.
Why didn't you stay at your original position? At least there you were an analyst. Because it was a stultifying environment. I disapproved of management pressures to recommend trades when
I thought there were no trading opportunities. Also, I saw that being allowed access to the company computers for
testing trading systems (my real desire) was a dead issue.
Did you know that you could have access to the computer at your new job? No, but since the company had just gone through a major shake-up and most of the management had been
fired, I figured there wouldn't be very much of a bureaucracy to interfere with my use of the computer.
What became of your work on computerized trading systems? Eventually, management got interested in using my research results for managing money. I developed the
first large-scale commercial computerized trading system.
What do you mean by large scale? The program was marketed by several hundred agents of the firm, and the equity under management was
several million dollars—a large amount of money in the early 1970s.
