V. 22:3 (76-83): Interview: David Norman On Market Technology by Jayanthi Gopalakrishnan

V. 22:3 (76-83): Interview: 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.

Q: Can you tell us about your background in finance and how you got interested in market technology?

A: 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.