How I Came to Love Stocks
By DOUGLAS M. ATKIN The New York Times
The attack on the World Trade Center has affected me more than any other event in my life. We lost two Instinet employees who were our good friends.
When I was a junior in high school, I worked as an assistant to a broker's assistant at a Merrill Lynch retail branch in Princeton, N.J., getting coffee and answering phones. From the moment I started that job, I fell in love with the stock market. I also bought my first stock 10 shares of Johnson & Johnson.
During my freshman year of college, I was a runner on the floor of the Commodities Exchange at the World Trade Center. It was a vision of capitalism the noise, the prices going all over the place, the yelling. There were huge amounts to take in every day. For a college kid, it was an amazing world down there a maze of buildings and shops that was a city and culture unto itself.
When I graduated from Tufts in 1984, my first full-time job was at Instinet. I got the job for two reasons. I had worked on the equity trading desks at Merrill Lynch, and my mom used to sit next to the secretary of the chief executive of Instinet on the train to New York. Like any good mother, she had multiple copies of my résumé.
Initially, I worked on the over-the- counter desk. My job was to get market makers to trade Nasdaq stocks electronically using Instinet technology. My first business trip outside of New York City was to a firm in Cleveland. We used to carry these huge trunks with computer screens and couplers to do the demonstrations. We showed up at the trading floor, and the head trader said: "What do you do? Magic tricks?" So we're setting up, and they're laughing and asking us if we need volunteers to be sawed in half. We had to wait three hours for some part to come, so we asked what we should do in Cleveland. And they said, "You should leave early."
Another time I was doing a demo at a money management firm on the West Coast, and the head of the trading desk said, "This is never going to work." I've stayed in touch with him over the years and I always ask him, "Do you think this is really going to work?" We laugh about it.
In 1992, I went to London to start up our international business in the basement of this dingy building, with five employees. At the time, the United States equity business was really cranking, and we were doing about three trades a day in European equities. I remember going into St. Bride's Church one day and thinking, "What on earth have I done?" By the time I left in 1998, we had 200 people.
The attack on the World Trade Center has affected me more than any other event in my life. We lost two Instinet employees who were our good friends. We had 200 people escape from 1 World Trade before it collapsed, which was miraculous. And 30 percent of our infrastructure was obliterated. I have this very heavy feeling, but I know I'm responsible for getting the business up and running. You have to force yourself to live through it and to make sure the troops are motivated. |
