==== Are there any trades that stand out from your early days as a currency trader? ====
In 1983, in the very early days of currency options trading on the Philadelphia Stock Exchange, one of the specialists was quoting a particular option at a price that was obviously off by 100 points. I bought fifty. Since this was a deep-in-the-money option, I immediately sold the underlying market and locked in a risk-free profit. [A deep-in-the-money option is just like an outright contract, with the added advantage that if the market has an extreme move the maximum risk is theoretically limited.]
I asked my broker whether the specialist was still offering to sell more options at the same price. "Yes," he replied, "the offer is still there."
"Buy another fifty," I said.
At the time, I was the only currency options trader on the Philadelphia Exchange that regularly traded in fifties. The entire daily volume in the market was only about two or three hundred contracts. I did another fifty, another fifty, and another fifty. Then Goldman Sachs came in and did fifty. All of a sudden, the specialist had sold three to four hundred of these options. He obviously thought he had a locked-in arbitrage profit, but he had done his arithmetic wrong. I knew exactly what was happening. Finally, I said to my broker, "Ask him if he wants to do one thousand."
"Just a second," he answered. The broker came back a half-minute later and said, "He'll do one thousand at this price."
The specialist had backed off his offer, but he was obviously still off by almost 100 points in his quote.
Finally I said to my broker, "Tell him to call me on my outside line." The specialist calls me up and says, "What are you doing?"
I respond, "What are you doing?"
He asks, "Do you really want to do one thousand?"
I answer, "Listen, you're off by a big figure on your price."
"What are you talking about?" he exclaims. I start walking him through the numbers. Before I finish he says, "I've got to go," and the phone goes dead.
I got off the phone and thought about it for a few minutes. I realized that holding him to the trade would put him out of business-a development that would be bad for the exchange and terrible for the product [currency options], which we were just beginning to trade in a significant way. I called my broker and said,
"Break all the trades after the first fifty."
At about the same time, my outside phone line rang. The specialist
was on the other end of the line. "I can't believe it!" he exclaimed, agonizing over the immensity of his error. "This is going to put me out of business."
I said, "Don't worry about it, I'm breaking all the trades, except the first fifty."
(By the way, Goldman refused to break any of the 150 they had done. Years later, after the specialist company had gone out of business, and the individual specialist had become the head trader for the largest
market maker on the floor, he always made it very difficult for Goldman on the floor.)
My action of breaking the trades represented a long-term business decision, which I didn't think about a lot at the time, but which I agonized over for years afterward.