This is John Lothian John Lothian

Prior to his being named to the FIA Hall of Fame in February of 2024, John Lothian was interviewed by John Lothian News intern Joanna Clohessy about his career and being inducted into the hall of fame. He knew before the announcement it was coming and had Clohessy interview him during her one week internship with this firm. The internship was part of a school program for Timothy Christian in Elmhurst, IL. Clohessy is headed to Indiana University in the fall of 2024 to study journalism and she had the chance to write a story about Lothian and conduct and edit this podcast. Here is the interview with John Lothian, the executive chairman and CEO of John J. Lothian & Company, Inc. and publisher of John Lothian News about his career and what it means to him to be named to the FIA Hall of Fame. 

In the late 1960s, there were two rogue candidates who ran for the role of chairman of Chicago's leading futures exchanges. One was Leo Melamed, head of the "Young Turks" at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange and the other was William Mallers, Sr. the youngest man ever elected chairman of the Chicago Board of Trade.
This infusion of young blood into these stodgy organizations would transform Chicago's financial markets and change the course of its place in the global financial markets. Melamed would lead the creation of the International Monetary Market, a separate exchange that would later be rolled back into the CME. Melamed's accomplishments during his career are legendary. 
Mallers would lead the committee at the CBOT that led to the creation of the Chicago Board Options Exchange. Both Mallers and Melamed would play a part in the creation of the National Futures Association, with Mallers finding CBOT President Robert Wilmouth a new job as NFA president. 
Melamed's story is well known via the multiple books he has written about his experiences and his long tenure on the board of the CME, which only ended a few years ago.
Mallers would step aside after one term as CBOT chairman and slate the man he had run against as a rogue candidate as chairman to replace him. Mallers would wield power behind the scenes at the CBOT for the next fifteen years without any official title. OK, maybe he was the unofficial godfather of CBOT politics at the time. 
Melamed would serve multiple terms as chairman of the CME before finally stepping aside for his protege Jack Sandner, though Melamed still wielded power from the CME executive committee he chaired for many years.  
Joe Sullivan talks about Mallers in his paper about his career and the beginning of the CBOE, noting it was Mallers who resurfaced after leaving the limelight of the chairman's position to weigh in on the question of which members of the CBOT should be able to trade on the CBOE. Mallers said that "the purpose of the undertaking had been to provide trading opportunities for all members whether or not they chose to use them at any given time." Sullivan noted that giving CBOT members this perpetual right would bite CBOE in the butt later. 
The story I was told by Mallers, whom I worked for in the 1980s at First American Discount, was that Eddie O'Connor had proposed creating an exchange to trade stock options at a dinner and outlined the plans on a cocktail napkin. Mallers took that idea as chairman and drove it to reality, along with O'Connor, Paul Maguire and several other key players at the CBOT.
The first board of directors of the CBOE did not have Mallers on it, but it did have Pat Hennessy, from Hennessy & Associates, the firm that Mallers was the president of when he was chairman. You can see how Mallers worked, having key allies in positions of power at the CBOT and also at the CBOT Clearing Corporation.
I met Mallers after he had fallen out of favor at the CBOT, and Tom Donovan as a strong CBOT president had changed the power dynamics of the exchange. 
As we celebrate the 50th anniversary of the CBOE, now Cboe Global Markets, I wanted to remember William Mallers, Sr., a man largely forgotten to history. Mallers died in 2006 at the age of 77. He had been gone from the industry since 2000 when First American was sold to ED&F Man, In

The Small Exchange announced plans to launch its first options contract on Small Precious Metals Product (SPRE) index futures on January 25, 2022. I interviewed Small Exchange CEO Donnie Roberts about the new product, Small Exchange’s plans for future options contracts, and the impending deal for the exchange to be acquired by Crypto.com. 
 
The SPRE index is made up of gold, silver and platinum prices, with the largest weighting on gold, then silver, Roberts said. The new options contracts will be cleared at the OCC, same as The Small Exchange’s futures contracts.
 
Roberts said they have two market makers in place for the new options contracts, and the exchange and OCC have done six months of testing to prepare for the launch.
 
Here is my interview with Donnie Roberts of the Small Exchange.

I wrote this column in 2012 for the John Lothian Newsletter after the death of my friend and Assistant Scoutmaster Bill Griswold. Reflecting on his life of giving, I reflected on all the giving of the readership of the John Lothian Newsletter over the years. 
Here is the commentary from 2012.
~John Lothian

When my son Tim was ten, he came home from school one day and told us at the dinner table about his day touring the middle school with his grade school class. After he finished explaining about Bryan Middle School in Elmhurst, which he would be attending next year, I told him it was a waste of his time.
I told him his mother and I had decided to send him to Hogwarts, the school Harry Potter attended. He smiled and said, “Right, Dad.”
This is the story of how some other parents and i pranked out sons into thinking they were going to Hogwarts.