Posts written by Patrick Lothian

“Financial professionals spend about 80 percent of their time managing data, and only about 20 percent of their time generating excess return for each given unit of risk.”

“Our markets here are the envy of the world because they are regulated in a very fair and orderly manner.”

“The greatest expression I’ve ever heard is, ‘The harder I work, the more opportunity I get.’”

Dr. Richard Sandor, chairman and CEO of Environmental Financial Products LLC, talks about inventing markets and the evolution of exchanges such as the CME, CBOE and ICE at the MWE World of Opportunity event in Chicago in 2013.

In this video from MarketsWiki Education’s World of Opportunity event in Chicago, Rich Mackey, managing director at Prime Trading, LLC, reminisces about his time as a caddie and how it prepared him for a career in finance.

“If you look at this from a game mentality, you can get trading down. You don’t have to be a Harvard grad or anything like that. You can be a country boy from Nebraska.”

“We were gung-ho we were going to be commodity brokers. When one of the speakers walked into the room he said within one year, half of you are no longer going to be in business. Within two years, there will only be five of you left in business. And within five years, there’s only going to be one of you left in the business. I’m the survivor and pretty happy about it.”

“I didn’t like the floor very much… It was the [CBOE], which wasn’t quite as rough and tumble as the futures floor, but I still felt kind of like this isn’t really a place for a nice girl like me.”

“Don’t bet against America. America will survive and prosper and so will you if you plan, save and invest.”

“You can’t be an entrepreneur until you get that big idea. And that idea needs to be so big it feels like a curse as much as a blessing in the sense that you know you have to go do it.”

“You never know who you might be sitting next to right now. It might be someone you run into 20 or 35 years from now and that might be the person that gives you the break you need.”

In this video from MarketsWiki Education’s Intern Recruiting Event in Chicago, Jim Hourihane, compliance manager for the National Futures Association, breaks down how the NFA works and what kind of opportunities present themselves in compliance.

“The regulator has to be an enabler. But their mission is to protect investors and help preserve the quality of the market. There’s a mission there that has to be preserved in the face of change.”