Lucas McConnell
AGE: 26
FIRM: Fusionary Trading
CITY: Chicago
TRADES: Eurodollar options
ON HIS FIRST DAY at work, Lucas
McConnell got lost. "It's a big floor down there," he recalls.
"There were people everywhere, and I was looking for two guys
in yellow jackets." I was just walking around." Eventually he
found his boss, Alan Rottman, and started clerking for the crack
Eurodollar-options team at Fusionary Trading. Having learned
his way around the floor, McConnell made trader this year -
and 2004 proved one of Fusionary's best.
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Patrick Bartley
AGE: 28
FIRM: Fusionary Trading
CITY: Chicago
TRADES: Eurodollar options
SOME LIKE IT HOT. Take
Patrick Bartley- he chose to attend the University of
Nevada at Las Vegas because he had endured too many
Chicago winters while growing up. But you can’t
pick a college based on climate, and you can’t
keep a born trader from his destiny. Bartley dropped
out after his sophomore year and returned to the Windy
City, where he had spent the previous summer as a clerk
in the CME pits. “I found it hard to give up,”
he says.
By the late ‘90s, Bartley was clerking
for legendary Eurodollar pit trader Alan Rottman. Today
he’s head trader for Rottman’s Eurodollar
options-trading group. With Bartley at the helm, Fusionary
cleaned up trading Eurodollar front-month options, perhaps
the most profitable market maker in the pit, and all
at a time when increased volume keeps ratcheting up
the pressure.
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“The thing about trading is that you have to be
here to make money,” Bartley says, explaining
why he hardly ever takes a vacation. But that’s
not to say he doesn’t snag the occasional long
weekend in toasty Vegas and take at least one week off
a year. “I was just in Carmel, California,”
he says, “and I found out I’m an awful surfer.”
He rides the waves of global interest-rates movement,
however, just fine.
