INTERVIEW
Trading At The Speed Of Light
David Norman On Market Technology
by Jayanthi Gopalakrishnan
Trading's come a long way since the days of the bucket shops, and
now, technology and trading have become virtually inseparable. Here's someone
who can tell us all about it: David Norman has been involved in trading
and financial markets technology for 19 years. He has traded for and overseen
trading operations in a variety of derivative instruments for a number
of international companies, including Prudential Bache International, Cargill
Investors Services, Sanwa Futures, Natwest Markets, and UBS Philips and
Drew. The author of two books on trading and market technology, Norman
is currently the director of market technology at Illinois Institute of
Technology (IIT) and a financial markets consultant for Office for Market
Technology, Inc.
STOCKS & COMMODITIES Editor Jayanthi Gopalakrishnan spoke with
Norman on January 9, 2004, asking him about the state of trading technology
today.
If you can get the expertise, then there's very little stopping you from competing directly with professional traders.
Can you tell us about your background in finance
and how you got interested in market technology?
I started trading on the London Stock Exchange in 1985. I was a trainee
trader when they still had the open outcry marketplace in London. From
trading in stocks, I went to trading in options around 1987, and then migrated
to trading futures in the early 1990s. So my experience really began in
stocks, which was a nice start, and then I went to derivatives at quite
an early stage.
I was involved throughout the mid- to late 1990s in trading on LIFFE
in several different futures and options products, and was broking open
outcry Bund futures when EUREX took back the lion's share of the business
from LIFFE in 1996 and 1997. From that point on, LIFFE began to build its
own electronic platform, and I got very interested in how that was going.
What did you do?
I spent some time upstairs working for a large American investment bank,
helping them integrate EUREX into their trading operation. So I learned
how the industry worked from a technical standpoint, learned who the participants
were, and really, since the mid- to late 1990s, I've been involved entirely
in technology. I stepped outside the trading arena for good in 1999.
And then you moved to academia?
Yes. But I originally came to Chicago to open the North American office
for a German company called RTS, a front-end trading systems provider.
Then I became interested in promoting electronic trading in academia. I
approached the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) in 2000 with a complete
graduate-level course in electronic trading, and started teaching in their
financial markets master's degree in science program as an adjunct professor.
IIT asked me to join them on a full-time basis a couple of years ago to
build a new market technology department.
Many schools seem to be offering courses like this now. Why is that?
It never used to be offered, at least when I was in college!
...Continued in the March 2004 issue of Technical Analysis of STOCKS
& COMMODITIES
Excerpted from an article originally published in the March 2004
issue of Technical Analysis of STOCKS & COMMODITIES magazine. All rights
reserved. © Copyright 2004, Technical Analysis, Inc.
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