A Career Defining Field Trip
Chicago Board of Trade circa 1970, via US Department of Agriculture
Bob Jersey, CEO, Gar Wood Securities –
I remember visiting the Chicago Board of Trade during a sixth-grade field trip. We were standing in the visitor’s gallery which overlooked the trading floor. There was a mass of people running around and yelling. There was so much energy and chaos – it was magnetic. As someone with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), I was drawn to the frenetic and simple nature of trading – buy low and sell high. Something just clicked during that field trip, and it set me off on a financial services journey that I continue to pursue.
I left high school in 1972 and found myself back at the Chicago Board of Trade asking the front-desk guard for a job. He introduced me to Bache & Co that hired me as a street messenger picking up tickets from the trading floor and running them back to the office to be entered. Later in the day, I would pick up reports from the clearing firms and bring them back. You could say I was one of the first trade routers in the industry. About seven months later, I was doing a similar job at the Chicago Board Options Exchange, which had just opened in 1973.
But I was young, inexperienced and restless so I took a year off to travel out West where my adventures took me to Colorado, Arizona and Northern California.
I ended up back in Chicago and landed a job with The Chicago Corp., in 1975 for Dealer Services Group, where we were executing 15% of all U.S. customer option business. I stayed for nearly 21 years and worked my way to Senior Vice President, Manager Correspondent Clearing Services. It was at The Chicago Corp. where I met Dennis Gerecke in 1987, who would later become my business partner at Gar Wood Securities. I met my wife Barb in 1980; she was working for Drexell Burnham on the CBOE trading floor, and we were married within a year.
By 1995, I was recruited away by Montgomery Securities in San Francisco to help them launch and run a prime brokerage business. In the meantime, banking giant ABN Amro of the Netherlands had acquired The Chicago Corp. and they recruited me back to start their prime brokerage business and run their correspondent clearing businesses, where I remained as a Senior Vice President until the bank sold the prime brokerage business to UBS and the clearing business to Merrill Lynch.
I took a year off from the financial services business and restored a wooden speedboat similar to a renowned Gar Wood Speedster model.
In 2003, Dennis and I decided it was time for us to start our own agency broker dealer prime brokerage and clearing firm. So, we launched Gar Wood Securities – a nod to my favorite type of speedboat – to offer execution and clearing services in securities and futures to self-directed traders, institutions and money managers.
It started with the two of us in my basement and has now grown to a network of xxx independent contractors and nearly a dozen team members. My son, Bobby, joined the firm in 2010 and together with Gar Wood’s leadership team, we continue to grow and provide the services that independent contractors need to succeed in their business.