The Early Years of Trading at JP Morgan

I was 20 years old at the time. I started work in 1983, so it was almost two years before we got our first PC. We'd get the overnight runs from the vaccine machines with our printouts of our bond positions and we'd scribble notes on them. So everything was done manually. The other thing, particularly in the Europe on markets in London, was a head-to-head trading competition. Back then you had to be very, very quick to move from one to getting liquidity from the different banks. And back then JP Morgan is really a world-class organization and back then it was even more special possibly than it is today.