Lynn Martin on Market Models and Meme Stock Trends

i c E Intercontinental Exchange. She began her career at IBM in Global services and came to them with a b. S. And Computer science and a master's degree in stats from Columbia. Lynn Martin, Welcome to Bloomberg. Thanks so much for having me, Thanks so much for joining us. I have so many things to ask you about, but but I have to start out with You're at IBM pretty much in its heyday.

Tell us what that experience was like. It was great, And I'm going to date myself a little bit, but I was there through the why two K crisis when global Services was relied upon by customers around the globe to get them through that crisis or near crisis or almost crisis, one of those crisis. It wasn't your that's fair.

It wasn't a crisis in that I remember waking up on New Year's Eve and going to work in a call center because that's what that's what you do in your twenties working at IBM, and we were watching the Australia the clocks hitting in Australia, and everything was fine, and we sort of knew that once Australia opened okay, we were going to be okay. So was this like a near miss or was this hey A lot was made about something that turned out to be less of

I think the industry became very well prepared it. I don't know that it was a near miss, but I think we got ahead of a potential Channe challenge. There was a technical challenge, and that computers only stood years understood years uh in two digits as opposed to four digits, so two thousand could have been and that could have caused challenges. I don't know if those challenges would have been as extreme as was forecasted or not, but I'm really glad we didn't find out, to say the very least,

so so IBM. I'm sort of jumping ahead in the story. You began your career in computer sciences coding on a Commoto or sixty four. You would you like to explain that for the you don't know what a Commodore six. I remember when I came home from elementary school one day and my dad, who was an electric electrical engineer he used to design fuel gauges on on airplanes, came home with this huge box. Uh. And it was a Commodore sixty four. I said, what's that? He said, the

first home computer. And I said, at what's that? I was a kid, I had no idea. Uh. And he also brought home a stack of floppy disks, which were quite large for the youth that don't remember, they were literally floppy there. They were floppy. You could bend them, twist them, whatever the case, though you shouldn't because your program would not work if you did that. Um. And I just became hooked on it. And as any good

kid does, you become hooked on video games first. So that's really what got me into the Commodore sixty four. So is that what led to a focus on data service and computer science the simple C sixty four. Well, what really led me in the path of studying for my undergrad was my dad giving me really good advice which was way ahead of its time in the early nineties when I was applying to college where he suggested I not go into the traditional engineering discipline but instead

go into computer science. It's mainly because not only was I good at math and good at sciences, but he said there will always be opportunities for women in computer science, and it's something that was just way ahead of its time, and it sounded good to a seventeen year old filling out a bunch of college essays at the kitchen table.

So I ticked off computer science despite you know, not having a tremendous amount of experience with a computer, aside from playing with video games and fiddling around more as a hobby than anything. And now you oversee a system that is a combination of advanced data systems, lots of hardware and software plumbing. You have to keep listed companies up and running, trading as much as a billion shares a day. How do you go from the common sixty

four to that? U Fortunately, technology has been significantly advanced, and I think that's what's contributing to the volumes of liquidity that you actually see in the markets, but also the amount of incoming order messages that we see every day. So when you say technology, it's the technology at the New York Stock Exchange as well as the technology at all the companies that are trading. Absolutely, and just macro technology. I remember the first um classes I took in my

compsite major. I learned assembly language. I was coding on a mainframe. I was moving from register one to register too, and that's like the most basic form. And now mainframes have become really thin machines. They've really moved into thin servers. They've moved into storage capacity like the cloud. So that the advancement of technology since I finished my degree in the late nineties to where it is today has really exploded into something that allows for more performance, more real

time type of interactions. There's a quote of yours I really like, which which probably explains your career, which is quote the amount of satisfaction I would get when I compiled the program. In the program did exactly what I wanted. It too, was beyond anything I had experienced previously. Explained that absolutely, So I tend to view computer coding not that dissimilar to communicating in a foreign language. A lot of times you're learning your French Spanish to communicate with

someone in a different country. When you're learning computer coding, you're just learning how to communicate with a machine. And a lot of times when you're communicating with that machine, you think you're telling them something really good and something really positive, and what comes out is something really not positive.

So very frequently, maybe because I wasn't the best coder, I would you know, come back with errors or stuff, uh stuck in what is known as an infinite loop, where the machine just keeps going and going and going repeat exactly kept doing that. So on the days when I would put you know, in code and the machine would do exactly what I told it to, I was like, oh, wow, that's great. So so you use the metaphor of a foreign language, um verb, tense, syntax, punctuation, all these things

really matter when you code it sure does. Syntax absolutely matters. Efficiency also absolutely matters. Think of the way I think of efficiency around computer coding is not that different to communicating with a local in in a in a foreign country. They've got there, you've got your typical language, you know, the stuff that you would learn in textbooks. But then you've got you know, the more shorthand types of communication. I kind of view efficient computer coding and the same

the same passion. Really quite interesting. Let's talk a little bit about the I P O process. How does this work? When a company decides they want to go public. So a company will decide they want to go public, Typically they will interview variety of exchanges. That could be domestic US exchanges, it could be if they are a foreign company, um, they will they will look at their home markets as well. Ultimately,

they have a certain objective in mind. Do they want to raise capital, do they not want to raise capital? If they want to raise capital, what investor base are they really targeting? More often than not, a company will select the US markets because we have the most diverse, the deepest pools of liquidity, uh, the biggest access to investors, the biggest opportunity for a company to gain a global following. So typically they will they will select a US exchange.

So you guys obviously have to prep when a company comes to you and says, hey, we're considering you and some of your competitors. What is your process like to prepare for. I don't know if we still use the phrase beauty contest, but that that was the old investment banking phrase. How do you gear up to say, here's why you should list with the NYC and not our competitors. So my philosophy is very focused on how can we be a good partner to our listed companies and what

is that listed company seeking to achieve? And it's not just about I P O day, I p O day, I kind of equate to a wedding day. You're going to have a great day, um hopefully, hopefully. But what I what I tend to think about is what happens a month after you go public? What happened six months after you go public? And how can we be a good partner to that firm and their public company journey. I love the visual of this as a wedding day, So so now I'm thinking of mother the bride, father

the bride. Who are you working more closely with? Is it the investment bank? Is it management of the company? Who you're working with? Both? Yeah, exactly exactly. You're working with the banks who are underrating the deal, the mother and father of the bride. To use your analogy, you're also working very closely with the company because the company has a vision. The company has been successful in that they've gotten to the point where they're graduating to the

public markets, which is something that should be celebrated. But the company also has a two year, three year, five year strategy of what they are really seeking to achieve, not just raising capital to fund operations or to fund research and development. They have may have M and A targets. They may want to expand their business through leveraging a community that the listings market, particularly the ny s C brings to the table. They may have specific concerns about

certain areas of the market. One one topic that see eos are very focused on at the moment is E S g UM Environmental, social and governance and how they are bringing sustainable practices to the market. So they want to tell that story. So everyone's got a different objective. So we spent a lot of time with CEO, CFO, UM I, r O, the whole team, CMO, Chief Marketing Officer, because they're the ones that are, you know, orchestrating the story.

So let's talk about the story a little bit. I just finished watching Apple iTunes we crashed, and what was so interesting was as they're marching towards an I p O. It has nothing to do with the exchange, It has nothing to do with raising capital. The narrative just seemed to have taken over from your perch. You must see these things go by all the time. Maybe not so much this year, which is a lighter I p O year,

but last year. How do you look at at these new breaking news stories and all these um all the buzz and mania around an I p O for both good and bad, how does that affect your job? Our job is ultimately to ensure that when a company comes to the market, they get the best experience possible when that stock opens and when that stock closes, first week, first day, whatever the case may be, and that they're

happy with the experience. Ultimately, if there is news around the company, it may influence their decision to go public at a certain time. Ultimately, the company that you're referencing did decide to go public, it just was at a different different a little a little later, and and there have been stories where that doesn't necessarily work out well. Or a company like Facebook goes public, the initial rollout is a little dicey. They announced something about mobile and

suddenly the stock takes off. So when you talk about the month or the year after the wedding, these stories really very much change. It's not just about the I p O day, is it. It's not just about the IPO it, but that's about the CEO articulating their strategy and executing on that strategy. And that's what's going to give the CEO and the public company the next group

of investors. They're going to get a group of investors on i p O Day, They're going to do their road show right before the i p O s They're going to garner the initial set of interest, and a lot of times companies will start that process even in a soft manner, even before they're on the road for the i p O. But post i p O day, it's about execution. And when they have really exciting news to share, the market tends to reward it, you know, more people come into the stock. Let's talk about some

other ways some people take their companies public. Um, we've watched SPACs super popular last year. They all seem to have blown up and done fairly poorly this year. How does the NYC look at a product like a spack as an alternative method did for a private company going public? Ultimately, we think SPACs are still a viable form for companies to go public. What you saw was a flood of

SPACs coming to the market at the same time. So that may have contributed to some of the challenges that have now have now happened given the time horizon that is associated with SPACs. Uh. But ultimately we see as a very viable form for companies to continue to come to market. Spacks have been around for probably fifteen to twenty years, and that's what those people forget is that this was a form that companies were using to go

public way before the last two years. They just became much more popular in the last couple of years, which is why you saw saw the flood, to say the very least. Uh, there's been a little bit of agitation towards direct listings where there seems to be a decent amount of controversy on both sides. How do you guys look at direct listings as opposed to the I p O process. But we pioneered the direct listing. We pioneered it, I believe three three or four years ago, UM, and

we are quite proud of that innovation. It's just another innovation allowing for private companies in this case that didn't want to raise capital, that didn't need to raise capital to become public companies, to have that public currency, to be able to do to fund their operations and or to do M and A and or all the other great things that come out along with with being a public company, including providing investors the opportunity to participate in

the upside associated with the company. What about the circumstances where investors can participate in the upside? Specifically, a lot of these venture backed companies have stayed private for much longer. They kept doing rounds and have grown to sizes that we previously would think of as hey, they should have gone public years ago. How do you guys look at that? Is this something that you pay attention to? Where do you think this go? Yeah, I mean, we believe in

the power of public markets. We believe in the upside that comes along with being a public company. Transparency, good governance, you get, you're able to reward your employees, You're able to reward shareholders, allow a diverse group of shareholders to participate in the upside. And based on the feedback that we hear from companies who are private, the public currency is still very strong. There is, despite the fact that there's volatility in the market. There is still demand for

companies to go public. They're just trying to figure out what time makes sense for them. Interesting. My extra special guest this week is Lynn Martin. She is the president of the world's largest stock exchange, the n y s C. They host listed companies with a market cap somewhere in the neighborhood of thirty six trillion dollars doing more than a billion shares on a good day. That sounds like a pretty complex situation just to begin with. What's it

like managing something with so many moving parts? There are a lot of moving parts, But because I'm a technologist, I feel really good about the service that we provide. You know. One of the first things when I hopped into this role in January, unsurprisingly that I focused on was system capacity and thinking about how what what's our average response times? What what sort of capacity do we have in the system to handle peak days. I'm glad I did that because a couple of weeks after that,

we had tremendous volatility. The week of January around then, which is pretty funny because the prior year was almost no volatility. Was the quietest year in alone. Started to

see it a bit in December. So we saw the signs in December that volatility was starting to creep into the market that we hadn't seen that to your point, you know, really since the pandemic um the way we look at capacity is incoming order messages for those listening and coming order messages is buys coming into the system, cells coming into the system, trades uh happening in the system.

And very quickly we started to see days that were in excess of above pandemic levels from a messaging standpoint, and equated to half a trillion messages being processed by our systems every day, So have a trillion and by messages, it's by sell trade buy cell trade. That is an incoming order messages, which is tremendous. And the fact that we were processing those with average response times in the box of about thirty micro seconds micro MicroC that's incredibly incredible. Yeah,

and you know that really has continued. It's been something I've had my eye on throughout the year. But our technologists have done a great job. We've recently upgraded our systems to our next generation matching engine technology and our systems have Touchwood held up beautifully from a response time standpoint. So when all these things go right, we never hear about it. But when there's a little snaff who it's front page of the Wall Street Journal. Um, let's let's

talk about some of those. Let's talk about what took place on the flash crash back in Do we really know whatever happened to that or did just And I'm gonna give you guys credit. These are all old data systems. Everything that existed then have more or less been replaced upgraded. Well, I think in a situation like that, you have seen a market structure evolve two to the point where there have been system safeguards from a market structure standpoint put

in place around volatility halts. Let me before you go there, let me just back up a little bit. So this used to be a fairly manual system, with individual specialists, human beings at different posts on the floor for each individual stock. I kind of forget, having grown up with that, I kind of forget. A lot of people are wholly unfamiliar with that. And there was a transition process where a lot of the manual processes were replaced with electronics

and and automated computers. There's still humans involved, but much less than they once were. What was that part of the impact in in the flash crash? And how has that transition happened A lot of which took place long before you got there. Yeah. Not, It wasn't necessarily as a result of any one particular area other than just an evolution of the market. What I like to say is the most technologically advanced companies employ humans um and

employ human interaction. Humans are there to make sense of what's going on in the market, apply human judgment, remove noise from the system. It goes back to what we're talking about very early on during our conversation today, which is when you're writing code, frequently what's going to come back is an error that because that is just the computer reacting automatically to something. If you don't have the human who can go in and fix the error, you're

going to remain in an error state. So the humans job is really to remove the noise from the system, is to remove the volatility from the system. It's something that I employed in my previous role where we value to point eight million securities and the fixed income opaque so out of the market. Uh. Using a lot of great systems, a lot of great mathematical mouths and also

a couple hundred humans. And the reason why we have the best data set out there is because I have those humans who are all former bond traders and former uh MUNI specialists who can make noise of what's coming into the system. I think the floor model is the exact same thing. During really volatile days, you saw the

human element really come into play. We saw two times less volatility on n y C issued stocks at the open, three times less volatility on n y C issued stocks at the close, and there's a hundred percent because of the job of the floor Really interesting. So let's talk about So you have stocks that are listed and some of this is NYC and some of this is into Continental Exchange. So they do stocks, they do bonds, they do options, they do derivatives. What else I don't know

if I left anything out futures? What what else is traded at either ny s C or I sees family of exchanges. We also have six clearing houses globally that cleared the bulk of the credit to false swaps market. Where are where are those six around the around? Our largest clearing house is based in Europe. Is uk f C a registered We've got a clearing house based in the US. We have a clearinghouse based in Singapore UH as well as one in the MIDA one in Canada.

So we've we've got We've got them sprinkled throughout the globe. And some of this is regional and some of this is redundancy and back up, and it makes it makes a whole lot of sense. So I've been talking. I keep talking about the n y s C like it's just the exchange. Let's talk about the n y C group.

That's four electronic exchanges UH NYC ARCA, which is the leader in et f S NYS American Exchange of Exchange, National Exchange, plus two options exchanges, the American Options and our options which I think one is the New York one is in San Francisco? Was that right? The floor is in San Francisco. So how do all I just mentioned four electronic exchanges to options changes? How do all of these integrate with the n y c S operations? So common technology UM is REELI what pulls all of

the exchanges together. The different medallions are really there to try different market models, different matching algorithms on the on the options side of the business, um different UH market models from the equity side of the business. It gives us more flexibility to have to be responsive to our customers. Quite fascinating. So I mentioned was sort of aberrational. At no point in the year was the market less than five percent from all time highs. That led to very

very little volatility and a year UM. How does a lack of volatility affect your daily work or UH? Really the right way to ask that is, when volatility spikes like we saw it this year, does that make your job harder? It makes your job different. It makes your job focused more on thinking about things like system capacity response times. You're looking at that super closely because you've

always want to have a very responsive matching engine. You spend a little bit less time though, welcoming I p o s to the market because many companies are not going to want to go out in a very volatile environment. So this raises an interesting question, what can you guys do to I don't know if you can end volatility, but what can you do to tame it or make it more manageable? Is there anything in your trading process that can facilitate taking some of the spikes and volatility well?

That's where that's where our market maker model really resonates. Sounds really resonating with those companies who still believe in the public current public market currency, which there's many of them, when they're thinking about coming to the market. Because you can't predict volatility. No one can control volatilly. No one can predict volatilly, but we can do things because of our market model to help the companies that are listed

on us have a less volatile experience. So our market model requires a designated market maker UM whose job is to trade that stock from the floor and they create an orderly market, correct correct, and they smooth out volatility, not just intra day, but also the open and the clothes, the open end, the closure incredibly important moments in time for a company, particularly if you think of a company having quarter end or they're having share repurchases or whatever

the case may be. So that's actually meaningful dollars even post an I p O in a CFOs mine when they're doing shared by backs, things of that nature. So that's where our market model really resonates, particularly in times like this when you see the volatility in the market, you see the VIX over twenty but you know that companies still want to go out in the public market.

You know, I think the public is probably less aware of some of the institutional order flow like buy on open or sell on clothes, which it doesn't hurt to have a professional overseeing that process so it doesn't get too well and also smooth at any imbalances because you're not necessarily going to have a balance book at the end of which means they're literally taking positions longer short in order to satisfy those those orders at um. So,

so let's talk about some some imbalances. Uh, And I'm thinking about the sort of meme stock mania that began in when everybody was stuck at home during the pandemic and just exploded in one. It was really a very unexpectedly wild ride, especially the companies involved. What was that experience like for you watching this You weren't yet president of the NYC in one, but you were still there.

Tell us what that experience was like. I mean, it was incredibly interesting to watch the the new retail interest in certain stocks and why they had picked certain stocks. And I think it's just still something that is is fascinating intellectually more than anything. I can't really comment on any of their decisions, but it's it's been interesting to watch how social media has really emboldened a new class of trader. My favorite moment of that was the young,

pretty handsome, young couple. And the way we subsidize our lifestyle is we buy stocks. We only buy the stocks that are going up, and when they go up, we sell them, and and we just do that over and over again from home. And I'm like, oh, I had no idea. Was that easy to get rich trading stocks?

Why did someone tell me that thirty years ago? I tend to take the view that having a very balanced portfolio and knowing what you invest in, investing for the long term is probably nine times out of tend, the maybe nine and a half times out of tend, the right philosophy to have. I think Warren Buffett wouldn't find anything to disagree with with that. Um And yet we

see people pilings companies of questionable potential. My favorite example was, um, was it Hurts that was bankrupt and everybody decided to buy Hurt Since then, so so as you're observing, this is part of your brain saying we have to do excellent Y and Z to stop this or is it Well, that's gonna be an interesting uh end when when that all? When that train stopped. So our job is to make sure the markets are open and are a vali to the most diverse set of investors. No paternalism, you just

exactly here's the platform. Ultimately, if there is questionable behavior, we police. That are red group. Who is a separate group police is that works closely with the regulator. So let's talk a little bit about that. You see behavior that sometimes it's just that looks pretty stupid, and sometimes it's like, hey, this is looking a little suspicious. Something doesn't smell right here. What happens when your systems start flashing little alerts, Hey look at this stock. Something seems

to be on kosher here. So that would be the job of reg to to look at various trades internally regulation. Yeah, they are a separate organization from from the business, but they they are an internal organization and then you know they would either take enforcement action if it was suspicious activity. Um, not stupid, not stupid. It's not our job again to take views on whether not a stock is worth something that's for the market right aside? Uh And then if

appropriate refer it to the regulators. So I would assume the NYC has a fairly close relationship with the SEC, and there's probably a lot of back and forth on on a regular basis. Uh, tell us a little bit about that. How does they are a regulator? We're an s R. Oh, so we did have a very close working relationship with them. UM so your self regulating organization. But you also have a relationship with the government regulator. Absolutely,

and I would imagine that's a fairly productive relationship. It is, it is. Obviously we're have a very strong rule book. We any time we make a change from market structure standpoint, from an order type standpoint, that has to be fully approved by the Commission. So we spend a lot of time with the SEC going through various rule changes. We want to introduce a new order type, we want to introduce a new different fee. Uh, there's a variety of reasons why we need to do so. Let's use a

let's use an example. I'm always again. Now I'm gonna show my age. The circuit breakers from the eighties and nineties were pretty modest, and things really had to go off the rails before they kicked in. UM circuit breakers have very much been brought up to speed, both on the broad market and individual companies. Tell us about the circuit breakers, Is that coming from the NYC? Is that

coming from this? So that is something in the wake of the volatility that has occurred at various points, various instances of stress in the market. I mean this goes back to an absolutely pandemic um. The market has really the positive of every time there has been a challenge, the market has developed system safeguards for lack of their description,

so and they apply to all of the exchanges. So utility halts for an example, we have volatility halts for securities individual securities, but then we also have system halts when the entirety of the market has a certain drop. For example, you saw the market wide circuit breakers kicking I believe four times during the pandemic, really during the

height of the pandemic. And that Yeah, And the way that works is if the SMP is trading seven percent below uh, it's it's opening level, it'll automatically hall opening level of previous close. So we close at three thousand, and we open points below that. There's a whole price there. Yeah, makes sense. And individual companies. What are those circuit breakers like it's I believe five um upper upper down. That's the tempt and the first halt. Actually, to be fair,

it depends on the liquidity in the stock. It could be five percent, could be why are depending on the overall liquidity and market. But when we when we see a liquid stock take a five or an eight or a ten percent haircut, they tend to keep trading. You'll have a very short halt and then just to let the book sort of re rejigger. So the first halt is how how many minutes? Uh? Five minutes? I think it's ten minutes, all right, And then the second halt is longer, and then if this continues to be a

mess it's halted for the day. So the first second, third strike, they're they're out. We haven't seen that in quite a while. What happens the next day when we when we reopen, how is that priced? Is it? Is it just the messages and orders or is there a specialist trying to special If that's where the open, that's

where our market model shine. You have the opening auction and the closing auction, which again perform that function I mentioned earlier of smoothing at any imbalances, whatever the case may be, to make for us smoother open and or a smoother clothes And that's why when I mentioned earlier that we've seen two two times less volatility at the open and three times less volatility at the close this year.

That's what I'm talking about, the opening and the closing off because the person is essentially a person is trying to make sense, smoothing that out and make neat a little more balance that might have been. And that means they're also going at risk and taking positions to facilitate that. Um. So, so you mentioned a couple of things I didn't get to. I want to follow up on. One is um the dual listing? So when a company is listed here and overseas or is that the only reason to be a

dual listening? How often? What are the other reasons to be besides geographic to be dual listed? A lot of times it's geographic. Very infrequently. There are some securities that are dual listed on US and our closest competitor in the US, but that's very infrequent. So it's typically to get access to a different group of of investors. A lot of times. You'll also see a primary listing and then something called an a d R be listed in

the US. What we'll do the primary that's more foreign issuers that will want to have their primary listing on the home market, but then tap the liquidity in the US market, so they'll issue uh a d R. And then what about additions and subtractions? I know, we occasionally see companies that were once smaller companies listed it more region what used to be considered regional exchanges, graduate to the NYC. And then every now and then somebody, uh you know, is past their cell by date and they

get delisted. Tell us a little bit about what that process is like, Yeah, I mean the de listing process. You know, there's a lot of things that go into the d listing to it's pretty mathematical. Check these boxes. It is, we've got a regg has a variety of requirement to maintain your listing. It could be certain financial wherewithal it could be the amount of shareholders and have individual shareholders that are participating in your stock. So there

is a formula that that gets followed. And what about the opposite, what about somebody graduating a better phrase to the n Y yeah, and we've seen actually quite a few companies graduate to the n y C um this year alone. We've actually seen quite a few companies transfer to the n y C this year. I think we've had fourteen so far to date at which is which is our best year on record. But um, we've we've seen we have a smaller listings venue called n y

C American which for the smaller cap companies. And you know, we're really happy when we see them graduate to the big board for lack of a better description, because it means they're having success, They're having a tremendous amount of success in the public markets. All right, let me throw you a little bit of a curve ball. I'm going to ask you a question you can't possibly answer, but

I feel compelled to ask it. So I remember getting a tour of the floor of the Exchange a million years ago, and it was giants, room after room after room down on Wall Street and Broad and literally where physical um chairs were being traded, traded physically person in person. That has slowly been computerized, that's slowly been um morphed into the modern market structure. But I have very fond memories of that massive building then it takes up like two city blocks. Is there always going to be a

physical exchange? This is the question that I don't know if anybody can answer, But is there always going to be a physical exchange on Wall Street? At what point does that just you know, become a venue for for you know, aftermarket I p O parties and things like that. There is always going to be the New York Stock Exchange at the corner of Wall Abroad. We've been here for two hundred thirty years count and not as being

here for the next two hundred thirty years. We've survived many a war, pandemic, volatility, crisis, all sorts of all sorts of unfortunate events. Um, so there will always be a exchange at the corner of Wallombrod. That's really good to hear. I have very fond memories of that, and not too far from there, the tour of the Federal Reserve. Right, So those were I think I'm trying to remember that was a high school teacher or a college teacher. It

was it was a ways ago. Um, all right, so I know only have you for a few minutes more. Let me jump to all my favorite questions. We ask all of our guests starting with what did you do to keep yourself entertained during the pandemic? What were you watching or listening to? Well? During the pandemic, I had the unique privilege of homeschooling to children in addition to doing my day job, which was focused on keeping the fixed income markets moving forward. UM. So that was that

was a challenge. UM, But I have to say I look back on it with fond memories, not just because our fixed income business provided a lot of transparency in a really opaque market, but also I got to spend some time, a lot of time with my kids. That that sounds like fun. Um. Let's talk about your mentors who helped to shape your career. I would say that I've had the opportunity to have mentors that have been

bosses all throughout my career. It really started with my first project executive who was helping guide me through IBM, who taught me a lot of really important lessons that I still stay true to, one of which is you

can never over communicate. Um. But throughout my career, I've been lucky fortunate that my bosses have always given me stretch jobs where they give me an opportunity to do a job that maybe I didn't have the background for, or I didn't think I have the background for, but they thought I was the right person for that job. Sounds interesting. Um, what are some of your favorite books?

What are you reading right now? Books? Are books are a challenge mainly because uh, I have I have a finite amount of time in my day right now, you know, continuing to read a couple of interesting business books. Like you know, I always go back to the Michael Lewis books because they're just a good read on on top of anything. Um, they're they're they have They're a unique mix of storytelling and business, so it kind of scratches both itches. For lack of a better description, I just

reread Liars Poker on its thirtieth anniversary. It holds up surprisingly Yeah, and you could see you could see the outlines of oh, it's not quite a full Michael Lewis book, but there are hints of the right he's about to become really quite Also, like Moneyball, Moneyball is one of my favorites. I mean, like that's hard to be in baseball season. I'm a baseball fan, so therefore I'm gonna, you know, focus on we may we may see the Mets go this year. I'm not gonna I'm gonna hold

my breath entering September. And you know what usually happens to to our boys from flashing in September. Right, they seem to be a little different team this year under another market participants, Stevie Cohen. Um, you gotta believe, right, I listen, I grew up with you know, the Lenny distra of of you. It's so easy to get to say stadium. We used to go to games all the time, and frequently to be disappointed, but so far, all I remember my first games were six, I mean, and that's

when I just fell in love with them. The little dribbler through the legs. That was it, exactly. I can't Bill Buckner and his name will go down and infamy, I assume in Boston. But man, that felt good in New York, right, So uh, And watching that team was a lot of fun with Strawberry and Ron Darling and who I think is a great broadcaster by the way, I turned into a great broadcaster. Um. You know, they were always an interesting team, even if they didn't bring

home as many they were they were. I remember going to the Subway Series between them and the Yankees in the World Series in two thousand. I think that was UH and is that a playoff for you know? There was the they were in the World Series together. Really kind of a blur to me that that was a like O eight nine that that year was a little

bit of a blur um our. Last two questions, what sort of advice would you give to a recent college grad who was interested in a career involving data services, listed stocks, any sort of training or exchange based work. The advice that I would give is to, in some respects expect the unexpected. And what I mean by that is your traditional degrees aren't necessarily going to be what's going to make you successful. So be intellectually curious about

the things not just involved in finance. Be intellectually curious about the technology under that underpins the systems. And clearly never be afraid to speak up if you want an opportunity or take on an additional project that may not be in your day to day but maybe something that that is just an area that interest to you interesting. And our final question, what do you know about the world of data services, exchanges, market training, UH, and public

companies today. You wish you knew twenty or so years ago. That is a great question. We saved it for last for a reason. I guess I wish I knew how important I wish I knew how important the role of the programmer was going to become in financial markets. I understood then that effectively fair value was determined by a variety of mathematics about a bunch of math for lack

of better description. Those mathematical models became much more sophisticated over time, But I don't know that I fully appreciated that the guy who or girl who was writing the code was going to be the one that was interacting with the systems twentysomething years ago, and the importance of efficient interaction quite fascinating. We have been speaking with Lynn Martin. She is President of the New York Stock Exchange. Thank you,

Lynn for being so generous with your time. If you enjoy this conversation, be shure and check out all of our previous four hundred or so podcasts we've done over the past eight years. You can find those at iTunes or Spotify, or wherever you get your favorite podcasts from. We love your comments, feedback, and suggestions right to us at m IB podcast at Bloomberg dot net. Sign up from my daily reading list at Rid Halts dot com.

Follow me on Twitter at rid Halts. I would be remiss if I did not think the crack team who helps put these conversations together each week. Bob Bragg is my audio engineer, Paris Walden is my producer. Atika val Bron is my project manager. Sean rue So is my head of research. I'm Barry Ritolts. You've been listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio.