Under the counter

Those of us who have been in the futures business for a while have got used to people in other financial markets looking down on us – the common consensus seems to be that we’re all Wild Western odd jacket wearing wide boys. I’ve mentioned before that this attitude seems a bit odd coming from the OTC community, where ‘electronic trading’ generally means typing a note to remind yourself to post some papers to 15 different lawyers. But sometimes it’s easy to think the equity boys are a few steps ahead...