A Fascinating Flashback to the Halcyon Days of Floor Trading In Chicago

This Brokers, Bagmen, and Moles podcast really took me back. It tells the complex and convoluted tale of the FBI sting operation on the floors of the CBOT and CME, and the trials that followed in the 1987-1990 period.

I worked for an FCM (located in the CME building at 30 S. Wacker) during one year that the sting occurred. Leo Melamed appears prominently in the podcast (and not in a good way, I might add): I frequently saw him in the elevator there. I had just started teaching at Michigan in January 1989 when the Chicago Tribune (to the fury of the FBI and DOJ) broke the story of the investigation. In something of a Walter Block moment, I wrote a paper (not published, nor even submitted) explaining, and to some extent justifying, the conduct that put some traders in jail (though not the right ones, from the perspective of podcast producer Anjay Nagpal).

I hadn’t thought about that paper in a long time, but the podcast resurrected it from the recesses of my memory. In a nutshell, as described in the podcast, a major aspect of the allegedly fraudulent conduct engaged in by floor brokers and locals revolved around the issue of “out trades.”

Out trades were an inherent feature of floor trading. Out trades were mistakes. Two traders could trade, and agree that they traded with one another, but disagree on the price. Those were relatively easy to resolve. Bigger problems occurred when, say, ABC said he sold to XYZ and XYZ said he didn’t buy from ABC. Or when ABC said he sold to XYZ and XYZ said he sold ABC.

These types of errors were endemic in the bustle and commotion of the pits. And they were often material. In essence, if an out trade occurred when a broker traded for a customer, and the error was detrimental to the customer, the broker had to make up the loss. In the case of ABC being a broker, and the price moved down subsequent to the time the trade should have occurred, and the broker corrected the error by selling for the customer at the lower price, ABC had to pay the customer the difference. If the error worked in the customer’s favor, he got to keep the benefit.

Especially in volatile markets and for big orders, six figure errors were not unheard of, and five figure errors were pretty common.

In essence, brokers were short a random number of options (the randomness being due to the unpredictable nature of out trades). This was a cost of doing brokerage business, and could be an appreciable cost.

And this was the hook for my paper. The bulk of the allegations against the traders was that in the aftermath of an out trade, a broker would make a trade with a local (i.e., an independent floor trader) that was profitable to the broker, but unprofitable to the local. This local was called the “bagman,” hence the middle word in the title of the podcast (and a book). The broker would later pay back the local by making off-market trades that cost customers money but were profitable for the local. For example, selling to the local at a price below the best bid in the pit.

When I first read the allegations, this struck me as an insurance arrangement, and hence the paper was titled (if I recall correctly–I’m looking for an old copy) “Broker Fraud as Out Trade Insurance.” In essence, the losses from out trades were spread out among all (or least many) of the broker’s customers. The bagmen were like insurance companies: eating a loss was a claim. The profits from off-market trades were the premiums. The customers paid the premiums in the form of unfavorable trading prices. (I also argued that broker associations, also controversial, were in large part an insurance arrangement).

My argument was that this was plausibly an efficient arrangement, as it led to a more efficient sharing of out trade risk, where out trade risk is inherent to open outrcry trading, just as fire risk is inherent to owning a house or accident risk is inherent to driving.

So were customers hurt? Well, if these practices were indeed insurance, customers actually benefited. A more efficient sharing of out trade risk reduced the cost of supplying brokerage services. With a highly competitive market for brokerage services, this lower cost would be passed on in the form of lower commissions, or better service, or more perks (like picking up bar tabs or losing more to the customer on the links).

Of course, it was almost certain that some of this type of trading was not undertaken to insure out trade risk. Some brokers no doubt took advantage of the widespread nature of the practice (where its ubiquity was driven by its putative efficiency) to rip off customers on some trades. However, as I argued in the paper, the ultimate effect of that kind of behavior on customers was mitigated by competition among brokers. The ability to harvest those kinds of illicit profits reduced the reservation commission that brokers charged.

(In making this argument, I riffed on an example from (then) Donald McCloskey’s price theory/micro text. He argued that the practice whereby shipyard labor cutting wood on sailing ships pocketed and sold shavings from the wood they cut had little impact on the cost of building or repairing ships, because labor market competition reduced wages by an amount commensurate with the value of the wood thus taken. McCloskey used this to illustrate the idea–originating with Adam Smith–of compensating wage differentials).

So the argument was basically not only was this not worth a federal case (or what was at the time the most expensive FBI investigation in history), it was arguably efficient, or at most a victimless crime (in equilibrium, anyways).

Other allegations included things like trading after the close. Again, in many cases this could be viewed as efficient, and beneficial to customers: trading at the close was often insanely chaotic, making it impossible to execute all orders before the bell rang.

Labor unions know that one of the most effective ways of disrupting a production process is to “work to rule”, i.e., adhere strictly to every agreed upon rule. In any tightly coupled system (e.g., an assembly line, an airline operating on a schedule, or a trading floor), allowing for some play in the joints–some departures from strict adherence to the rules–can allow it to operate more efficiently. Strict adherence to the rules would likely have interfered substantially with the efficiency of the floor trading process.

Or think of the mess that an NBA game would be if refs called every foul. “No harm no foul” is a reasonable way to call a game.

To the outrage of other defendants–who claimed that nothing untoward happened on the floor–the lawyer for two defendants (a guy named David Durkin, interviewed in the last episode of the podcast) argued that yeah, this stuff happened all the time, and it wasn’t fraud. He didn’t make exactly the same argument as I did, but his argument rhymed with mine. That is, the intent of these violations of the rules was not to defraud, which would be necessary to achieve a criminal conviction. (The argument was not tested at trial. For perfectly understandable reasons, guys facing RICO charges and 20 years in Club Fed took a deal and pled out for terms of 8-10 months. One could argue that the relatively big delta between the deal and the penalty if they had lost reflected the government’s assessment that the argument could have indeed been persuasive to a jury.).

Take it as you will. All I can say is that nothing in the podcast made me change my mind from what I came to believe 35 years ago. (Time flies!)

The podcast delves deeply into the genesis of the investigation. This material was pretty new to me. I had heard nothing previously to challenge the public explanation that ADM’s Dwayne Andreas was ticked off (no pun intended) at being ripped off by the floor, and sicced the FBI on the exchanges. But after listening to the podcast, like Nagpal I find it unpersuasive. Would that really be sufficient motivation for the DOJ and FBI to launch such an ambitious investigation? (Perhaps they didn’t realize how hard it would be, and doubled down once they got in–the sunk cost fallacy at work.). Was it really aimed at the exchanges themselves, or the bigwigs there? Was it really launched to investigate mob money laundering? After all these years, these remain open questions, despite Nagpal’s dogged efforts to answer them.

The podcast also featured extensive interviews with various traders–some convicted, some not, and some not even charged. Those brought back memories of the floor in all its glory, color, character, and characters. And the accents! Having been away for years, the distinctive Chicago accents were truly noticeable and entertaining: at the time, as a fish in those waters, they would have seemed to be normal.

My only criticism of the podcast is in its attempt to draw Big Lessons. Nagpal’s big lessons were: (a) this conduct was rife; (b) it was fraudulent and harmed customers; (c) it was so rife that bigwigs–notably Leo Melamed–participated in it; (d) the fact that the bigwigs skated was a travesty of justice; and (e) the episode demonstrates the fundamental flaws in exchange self-regulation.

Here Nagpal gets preachy. Though in the last episode (in which Durkin plays a prominent role) he does start to wonder whether the bad stuff really wasn’t so bad after all, and that some of the bad guys really weren’t that bad.

As someone who wrote a lot about self-regulation in the 90s in particular (in large part due to the experience of dealing with it in the aftermath of the Ferruzzi episode), I am surely not in the self-regulation hallelujah chorus. However, I vigorously disagree with Nagpal’s contention that putting the futures exchanges under the aegis of the SEC would represent an improvement (not least because stock exchanges regulated by the SEC are also self-regulatory organizations). In the case of the investigation of the floor, the assumption that self-regulation failed presumes that the conduct was truly predominately fraudulent: as argued above, that’s debatable.

And yes, exchange governance is political–as discussed in detail in my 1995 and 2000 JLE articles. But government regulation is politicized too.

Overall, though, those are quibbles. In laying out in detail the complex facts, and letting the principals speak at length, Brokers, Bagmen, and Moles sheds considerable light on a long forgotten but epochal moment in the history of Chicago’s exchanges. It’s a kind of unvarnished history and I hope that others make similar contributions before the old floor traders, like old soldiers, just fade away like the sound in the pit after the closing bell.