I was in the US Army in 1967 - 1968, stationed in Virginia, hardly spoke English, when there was a major article in Playboy on commodities trading. I was already trading stocks but the article got me started in futures. I am one of 5 remaining charter subscribers to Futures Magazine (used to be called Commodities)
Fired up by the article I have opened an account at DuPont Glore Forgan in Newport News, Virginia (why would they approve a GI with $175 a month income? but they did) and I promptly lost a bunch in egg futures.
At that time I personally got many calls from members of the CME to solicit business from me. I don't think they would do it now
I did not give up, studied the seasonals in grains and my trading turned around and a few years later I was able to impress the interviewer at ContiCommodities and they hired me as a commodity broker/salesman.
In the late sixties we got the prices from newspapers and charted by hand.
In 1969 I went to the Cocoa Exchange in NYC and asked them for some historical price info and they led me to a stand with a leather bound book which contained all the quotes to that day.
In 1973 I was a broker at Shearson and my partner and I bought a Wang computer (the first non-mainframe computer on the market, cost 25K) It was the size of a desk with a memory of 64K. Our programmer entered data on punch cards but for live trading there was Quotron which had simple charting capability already. Our partnership fell apart (due to losses) and we gave the computer to our programmer who resold it for 2K only 6 months after we purchased it because the IBM PC came out and killed Wang.
In the late seventies I traded from home and I had a hardwired Western Union Telegraph machine installed with a data feed from the Sugar and Coffee Exchange. This was a huge and noisy box 20"deep 24" wide 36" high, which printed on a wide paper, cost $70 per month. Later I replaced it with a ticker (I forgot the name of the company, Trans-Lux perhaps), that printed prices on a 1" wide thermal paper. I also had a direct line to one of the floorbrokers in the sugar ring.
Options? They were no listed options. There was a tiny box ad or two in the WSJ from brokers quoting 5 or 6 actively traded stock options.
In 79 I bought a membership on the Coffee and Sugar Exchange to save on commissions (retail commissions were like $35RT as opposed to clearing floor trades for around $2RT plus the shared salary of a clerk) and when I appeared in front of the Floor Committee they asked me what will I do for a living. I said I was a trader and I traded for a living. They were shocked because I was the first person there who did not support their trading with brokerage. Al those people came through the ranks, clerking first and brokering when they were ready.
The guarantee for the floor permit was 100K but just after I bought my seat I lost a chunk and did not have the 100 so a clearing broker guaranteed me until I caught up. At some point, I think it was the crash of the gold/silver market, when some guys blew out big and they raised the guarantee to 1mil. After I left the floor in 83 the guarantee has been raised to unlimited, meaning that one would have to be a star trader with backing of a powerful clearing broker or be an employee of a big firm (with strict constrains) to step on the floor.
I was away from trading for like 16 years and in that time trading evolved into a much easier and efficient deal for everyone. There is liquidity, cheap commissions and instant delivery of data plus cheap and ample computing power and instantaneous order placement.
People should have nothing to moan about but they do.
GC
