Tom Theys: Building more democratic access to markets

摘要

Tom Theys moved to London in 1981 to trade at the fledgling London International Financial Futures Exchange (Liffe). Theys, who learned the futures business from the ground up starting as a runner and eventually becoming a trader at the Chicago Board of Trade, found success trading on Liffe and couldn't imagine at the time that he would create a company whose technology would put Liffe on the edge of extinction. "We were over there to help get Liffe started. I was one of the first Americans on the floor," says Theys, who would take an active roll at Liffe serving on multiple committees. But then, in the early 1990s, Theys had an idea to create a handheld device to put orders into other markets and in particular, the Deutsche Terminborse (DTB), which was the forerunner to Eurex. "We built an interface from my handheld to trade onto DTB so that we could do arbitrage. I got together with some techies and designed a product that would work in a mobile environment, in other words, Internet technology."