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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