Editor’s note: trader and mathematician Michael Greenbaum is famous in the world of option trading as the firm he founded – O’Connor Associates – became synonymous with the highest level of derivative trading based on theoreticals and modeling. It eventually was a major player in nearly every form of derivatives arbitrage practiced on Wall Street.
I met Mike Gallagher shortly after I joined Thomson McKinnon Auchincloss Kohlmeyer (TMAK) in 1976. Mike ran the Thomson operation on the floor of the CBOE at the time. Later, as I progressed to trading the TMAK arbitrage and option proprietary accounts, Mike and his partners were our main floor brokers on the CBOE. I talked to Mike recently, and asked him about some of the early days at the CBOE
Bear markets are tricky, and if what we are seeing now is the continuation of the bear market, it is exhibiting some of the actions that are designed to fool most of the people most of the time.
I met David Lucterhand when we were both freshmen living on the same floor in the H-1 Dorm at Purdue in the fall of 1964. A few years later, on my first visit to the CBOE – in November of 1974 – I was on the small trading floor in the old smoking room. To my surprise, there was David Lucterhand, making markets on the CBOE. I called David this week to get some of his remembrances of the early days:
The following is a remembrance of the early days of listed option trading, written by my good friend, who was an arb at Paine Webber.
In February of 1974, I finished my four-year hitch in the Air Force and was able to parlay my degree in math into a position in the Arbitrage Department at PaineWebber, which was looking to add options trading to their risk arb and convertible bond efforts.
I had been trading over-the-counter options for some time, ever since having read the book “Beat The Market,” by Edward Thorp (yes, the same guy who originally figured out how to properly count cards in blackjack and had also written “Beat The Dealer.”) Sometime in mid-1973, my broker Ron Dilks, called me and said that he had read an article in Business Week about listed stock options. It was about the Chicago Board Option Exchange (CBOE), which had begun trading listed options a few months earlier, in April of 1973.
50 years ago, on April 23rd, 1973, the CBOE opened its doors and listed option trading began. For the first time, such things as standardized striking prices and expiration dates were available on an option contract.
The CBOE’s first President, Joe Sullivan, had done a tremendous amount of legwork, regulatory work, and arm-twisting (I’m sure) to get the exchange off the ground.
An item that has been affected by higher interest rates is the premium on S&P (and other) Index futures. The premium on a stock index futures contract is related to dividends (higher dividend payouts decrease the premium on the futures) and interest rates (higher interest rates increase the premium on the futures). We received this question recently, and I realized once again that newer traders may not have seen this before:
It turns out that the increase in interest rates has gone on long enough and raised rates enough that some things regarding derivatives are occurring that haven’t been in place in quite some time – or ever, for that matter. We are going to address a couple of related topics. Newer option traders might not have seen some of these things before, since essentially interest rates have been at or near zero since 2009, until last year.
