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This is the last article Jay contributed to Mondo Visione. We are republishing it in his memory.
A career on “The Street”: From heretic to sage
My career on Wall Street began in 1950 at the brokerage firm,Garvin, Bantel & Co., where I was paid the princely salary of USD60 per week. I started at the bottom and, appropriately given my later interest in market technology, my first job was changing the ink on the TransLux ticker machine.
In those early days I did not know a stock from a bond; but I did know that there was money to be made on Wall Street. Like many other young men, I decided that I’d like some of this money to be mine, and I realized that if I was to make this a reality I would have to understand the mechanics of ‘The Street’.
So I set myself the task of gaining the best possible understanding of how Wall Street worked – and it was as a result of this process that I slowly began to realize that certain things on Wall Street were not working as well as they should. In particular, one of the areas where there was ample room for improvement was trading. Trading, in those days, was tilted infavor of the people who ran the trading venues, whereas it seemed to me that that the markets should serve the needs of their customers. Perhaps this was the view of a naïve young man; but if so, I must confess that it is a naïveté that I have failed to shake off to the present day.
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