From 10 Up in Netscape to Exchange Bigwig

Catherine Clay, EVP at Cboe, joins Steve Sosnick to discuss her evolution from floor trader to one of the top female executives on Wall Street.

Summary – Traders’ Insight Radio Ep. 25

The following is a summary of a live audio recording and may contain errors in spelling or grammar.  Although IBKR has edited for clarity no material changes have been made.

Steve Sosnick

Hi everybody, welcome to Interactive Brokers Traders’ Insight Radio. I’m your host Steve Sosnick, chief strategist here at Interactive Brokers. My guest today is someone I’ve known for over 20 years, Catherine Clay, I’m going to call her Cathy, because I’ve known her for a for a long time. She is an EVP at the CBOE, the Chicago Exchange, and she and I have a lot to talk about.

She has one of the most interesting career trajectories from being sort of the person on the other end of the phone with me many, many years ago to being one of the most senior executives at a major exchange and in a business where there’s not enough gender equality necessarily. She is one of the top female executives on Wall Street and I’m proud to say that I knew her back when. So Cathy, why don’t you just say hello and give yourself a quick intro?

Catherine Clay

Thanks, Steve, that’s a that’s quite an intro and I can just say so glad to be with you today on this radio show ‘cause it has been many, many years since we first got acquainted … my very first job out of Graduate School and it’s just so nice to be back talking with you today.

Steve Sosnick

Well, I’m not asking you what the what the latest 10 lot is trading in Netscape, which was probably like one of our early, early discussions. You know that was the big stock back in the day, and I think I’m going to come around to that later ’cause you know, Netscape is to the Internet what some of the crypto currencies are to the blockchain, but we’ll get into that later, potentially.

Tell us a little bit about your trajectory. You know, I may interject basically, the parts that I was a supporting player in, and we’ll go from there.

Catherine Clay

So, you know I was right out of Graduate School and my sister was working on the San Francisco Options Exchange.  And she said to me, “before you get a job now that you’re done with school, you need to come out here and see what happens on this trading floor”.  I drove out there from Boulder, Colorado to San Francisco, walked onto the trading floor, saw all this, yelling, screaming.  You know what it’s like Steve.

Steve Sosnick

Yeah, of course…

Catherine Clay

Paper flying, lunches all over the floor, just a disaster. No idea what was happening, but the energy of the floor, it just captivated me and in that very moment I said, “I don’t know what this is, but I need to learn how to do it.” And I started interviewing with firms on the floor … ABN AMRO, you name it.   All the names blur, but Timber Hill, the market making firm of Interactive Brokers, was on the floor at the time. Just recently had put an operation from the CBOE team onto the San Francisco floor under David Eglit, who I believe is still at Interactive Brokers today or is back.

Steve Sosnick

He is and spoiler alert, he’s a future podcast, so we I figure we’ll sort of have that little loop closed in a moment, but yes.

Catherine Clay

Oh good, let’s make this so hard he can’t follow it, so that’s good to know. And so, Dave was building this team out on the on the San Francisco Exchange, which is now called the NYSE ARCA Options Exchange in San Francisco. And I started just like most of derivatives traders started as a clerk getting lunch for traders and learning the business through the traders’ eyes, and then eventually became a new market maker myself, and of course talked to you many, many times on the phone learning what the heck I was doing and how you were looking at risk.

We called what you were on the bridge, which was the risk desk that really ran the show for the entire market making opportunity. And you know, I always say this when I talk about my career trajectory is that I don’t think it would have been what it has been if I hadn’t started under Thomas Peterffy’s tutelage.

And you’ll know what I mean when I say Thomas was unique in many ways, but the way he was most helpful to me was instilling at a very early age that technology would change everything in the markets and that we should embrace it. And in fact, it did. But having that early exposure to the importance of using emerging technologies in trading and in whatever business you’re in couldn’t have been more helpful to me.  That moved into becoming my own market maker and having my own trading firm developing my own risk software. Ultimately working on the LiveVol derivatives analytics product that was acquired in 2015 by CBOE. And that’s how I made my way to CBOE.  At the time CBOE had no data and analytics arm whatsoever, and so in 2015 with that acquisition we began to acquire their companies and build out what is now a very thriving business here at CBOE, and I couldn’t be happier than to have done that here.

Steve Sosnick

Well, I’m going to skip to the end and say that I’m a consumer of some of the CBOE’s products. I definitely interacted with many of the members on your team, just exchanging ideas over the years, and I think it’s remarkable that you, you know basically took nothing and ran with it and it’s now a very important piece of business.

Going back to the early days, on the floor it was kind of wild because we don’t… I look back at it now and it doesn’t seem like high tech, you know you were out there like basically like a Sherpa with the handhelds which were, these I guess… sort of three generations prior to an iPad where it’s like a touch screen and you would bring up… well you could explain it better than me, ’cause quite frankly, you interacted with the touch screens much more than I did.

Catherine Clay

I did, you know we had two kinds of touchscreens. We had the monitors like a PC monitor that was a touch screen but also those of us where we were standing in the pits, we had a handheld which was like a heavy Mac. I mean, it was like a heavy tablet at the time, but they all had radio-controlled devices so that the communications could be transmitted wirelessly. And I just remember it was so new technology. Yeah, doesn’t seem cutting edge today, but there were people in the pits that were so afraid that they were going to get radioactive poisoning from the antennas that they would bring in like Geiger counters and other sort of mechanisms and say, “keep your laptop away from me like it’s going to poison me.”

Steve Sosnick

That’s hysterical, but it was a huge deal because at that point you were out there with prices that we were sending you continually and taking your feedback.  When you’d have the prices, someone would call out a market, you’d price it up, and participate in the trade. You’d then enter the trade, which would come back up to the bridge, as we called it, in Greenwich and we would essentially be repricing everything continuously, and so you’d always have continuous quotes. And at the point you started, there were still plenty of people with sheets, and you know having to guess the deltas, yeah?

Catherine Clay

Yeah, and not only that, but I also mean you’re talking about this dynamic feedback loop between trading risk dynamics versus everyone else in the pit who was “hey run me sheets and center it at this stock price” and then you would get the Black-Scholes model or whatever model you were using for your theoretical values and Greeks across the spectrum of the products you were trading. Well, we were seeing where the “Spoos” [S&P 500 futures] were going maybe just a little bit faster and we were actually being able to hedge risk in real time.

Steve Sosnick

What we actually did — I don’t know if you realize it ’cause you were on the coast — we had a guy in Chicago who was literally just ticking up and down.  We’d start the day with one and there were a few different people ’cause he couldn’t do it for the entire trading day, but you know, he would just continually tick up and down the price of the futures. And so, if it went up five ticks, he’d tick 1-2-3-4-5. I’m doing this visually, no one could see what I’m doing, but he’d go 1-2-3-4-5, go down 3 ticks and this is how– and that was what drove the prices.  That, and the trades that we would be getting back.

It was a little easier in the sense that most things were not inter-listed in those days, so if you did a trade in one of your products it was more or less just you. It wasn’t across 15 exchanges… everything was — Not everything, many things were single listed. The most interesting products were.

Catherine Clay

Oh yeah, for the longest time I remember on our exchange we had Microsoft, Micron, AOL, Compaq computers, Sun Microsystems. You know, a lot of the things that you would associate with Silicon Valley were on the P-Coast [Pacific Exchange]. Not surprisingly, but of course on CBOE you had Intel and IBM and Coke and all of those names. Names we’d be really jealous that we didn’t get to get to trade, but that changed, didn’t it pretty financially?

Steve Sosnick

It did. I did bring this up on another podcast. The system actually has Thomas and I to blame for that one and one of our specialists on the PHLX.  It was because Ford was a CBOE stock that was single listed on the CBOE, but we were the specialist and a company called Visteon, which was a small auto parts manufacturer that Ford acquired.

Typically, what would happen would be you’d trade … because if you were trading Visteon and they got taken over for stock they would trade the residual Visteon options which were sort of this weird multiplier of Ford, but you know the gentleman’s agreement was you didn’t take Ford. And someone at the PHLX messed up and sent the allocation sheet down… “Do you want to trade Ford?   You guys get first dibs because you’re trading Visteon” and I said “yes,” jumped on it, and then realized “Oh wait. I may have made a horrible mistake here.”  So I went into Thomas’ office and said, “By the way, I think I just started a war here” and he’s like “That was going to happen anyway, go ahead. You know, it’s inevitable. Just do it.” And that’s literally how the dam broke.

Catherine Clay

Now that fact is missing from the history books of the multi-list options.

Steve Sosnick

So it was literally just like a series of errors and then ultimately the decision maker who said “Yeah, you know what this was going to happen no matter what.” So that was–

Catherine Clay

That was a shot across the bow.

Steve Sosnick

That was the shot across the bow. And then everybody– then I think immediately the CBOE listed Dell, which was the biggest PHLX name and then it was a free for all.

Now, so you were down there successfully. David Eglit, who had been running the P-Coast, left the exchange and moved back to Chicago, then worked here up in Greenwich. For a while, was back in Greenwich. You were running the exchange, but then to a certain extent you were almost a victim of the electronic nature of the markets because we were going fully electronic, such as it was then, you know, ARCA.  It had to have been a challenge for you because you were sort of made — I hate to say it, but you were kind of made redundant. Obviously, you’ve bounced back quite well from that, but–

Catherine Clay

Oh yeah, I mean it was, it was. You know, I hung on for a while after leaving you know, when Timber Hill was pulling all traders off the floor, I did have the offer to come join you in Greenwich. Which you know who would– You know we could be working together today, Steve.

Steve Sosnick

Absolutely.

Catherine Clay

But I decided to take the riskier path and just start my own market making company and was down there for believe it or not till 2010. I was still on the floor making markets as a sole proprietor, so you know it was a long in the tooth career but thank goodness I really did get involved in software development and figuring out how all of that worked and then got involved with LiveVol, first as their Chief Strategy Officer and then as their CEO and then subsequently got acquired by CBOE.

So, it all worked out great, and you know every time a door closes — and it certainly did for many, many floor traders — doors open.  I got a big door that opened for me, and I’m not lost in the idea that everybody had such a trajectory after the floor close, because there’s a lot of sad stories from traders who didn’t make the change.

Steve Sosnick

Yeah, and it’s interesting ’cause I’ve interviewed a couple of other traders who did make the change from various exchanges, and I guess you know, as they say, history is written by the winners.  I suppose you know you’re one of the winners, but it is interesting. Some of the people were born to be good floor traders and not necessarily able to translate that skill set off the floor. Other people… I do always think that the floor traders, or at least the ones who worked best in our system, many of them did actually go on to very good careers elsewhere or work here in other roles.  We did start to bring a lot of them up [to Greenwich]. You were one of the few who said no.

Catherine Clay

I don’t know why I was so smitten with San Francisco and just the lifestyle, there’s outdoors. I surfed almost every day after the market closed, I couldn’t imagine giving that up and I knew the hours you were working the bridge. I thought “I don’t know, how am I gonna snowboard? When am I gonna surf if I go do that?”  So that was really the decision maker for me.

Steve Sosnick

How’s the surfing on Lake Michigan?

Catherine Clay

I hear it does exist. I have yet to witness it.

Steve Sosnick

OK, fair enough, so now tell me about how the LiveVol product evolved and how that became in a bigger way, your role in the CBOE.

Catherine Clay

The LiveVol product was really … there’s a couple floor traders on the P-Coast that were trying to develop analytics for their own trading firm. And you have to think back way back to the time when there wasn’t a really good measure of implied volatility over any set duration, tracked or history, and all of that. It was actually pretty cutting edge in terms of what they were developing for their own trading. The fellow traders around them were very enamored with what they were building, and so we became early investors, but most of the floor traders were investors in the product and we continued to develop it and develop it.

And then we kept getting calls from like the Fidelity’s and the Schwab’s of the world, asking, “Hey, how are you doing these analytics? And you know, maybe you could help us.”  And then it became a business. And then ultimately CBOE came to the recognition that they had way too much revenue concentration in the proprietary products, SPX and VIX. They really needed to think about their growth trajectory in the future, and it was pretty clear that they needed to start diversifying into non-transactional revenue sources.  Plus, you gotta think about the tools and the analytics, the data that help actually foster transactions into our tradeable markets.

Whether its portfolio risk, margin risk, getting to an actionable step in a trading workflow easier, that all facilitates back into the exchange business, so it just made sense to align the businesses and start the group here at CBOE. So, we’ve done that pretty aggressively.

Steve Sosnick

And how have you since expanded it? Because it’s well beyond what you brought via LiveVol, and I believe you’re responsible for a lot of that expansion.

Catherine Clay

So yeah, so I mean the original LiveVol acquisition brought an analytics platform, and it also brought a data shop which is our e-commerce answer for historical data. You can remember how difficult it was to send anybody historical data. Now it’s like shopping on Amazon, you just go to your cart, you put the incremental data in, you run a job and you have your data pretty much instantaneously. So, that was, a foundation that LiveVol brought, and then we acquired SILEX which is an OEMS front end platform in 2017 and then in 2020 right before the pandemic we acquired 3 companies which I will tell you, I will never do again.

Three at once? Never. Three at once in front of a pandemic? That’s ridiculous, but we acquired Hanweck, very well known for their fitted vol. surfaces and vols. and Greeks and great modeling, FT Options, great portfolio risk, IP, and Trade Alert. Very heavily used on the sell side desks for market color, aggregated market statistics. We brought that company in and then we combined all of our analytics with our index business which has really never been an index business, more of an educational tool to help people understand how to systematize trading strategies into our proprietary products, but we’re turning it into a business. And then we combined it finally, with the real time market data business at CBOE and so bringing all of these groups together, creating a single technology platform for much of the group… Creating a single source of truth for all of our options, analytics has really allowed us to scale in a very profound way, and then when you couple that with our exchange expansion up in Canada… you know, we just bought MATCHnow and NEO. In Australia, we bought Chi-X Australia. In Japan, we bought Chi-X Japan and so you can see as we spread across as the world largest Securities Exchange network the analytics and data that go with that expansion are just hand in hand and we’ll just repeat the same playbook in every geographic region in the world, plus all the asset classes we’ve moved into, which most recently is digital assets through our acquisition of Eris X.

Steve Sosnick

Now the timing of that is very auspicious ’cause that brings us back to one of the things we talked about earlier. How do you view crypto as falling into, you know the more traditional — I was going to say traditional exchange space but really CBOE was born out of the derivatives markets, you’ve since acquired traditional equities businesses.

I will say at which I did have a role in closing one of them. I was on the board of the CBSX if you can remember that one.

Catherine Clay

Yes, I do remember.

Steve Sosnick

Yeah, so I’m one of the few people who’s actually closed an exchange, but that was.

Catherine Clay

Nicely done.

Steve Sosnick

Yeah. It needed to be done, but it was, but it was a weird situation I understand. For those of you who don’t know the history, the various options exchanges had stock exchanges because they you know if you were doing a buy-write, they didn’t want to lose the stock transaction portion of it. But the way it was organized for that was actually a very big liability for CBOE, the way it was organized.

Steve Sosnick

Then you went out and bought BATS which was a whole different ball game, but at the time it was, it was a lot of liability and not much revenue, and so I —

Catherine Clay

Sounds like a bad trade, yeah?

Steve Sosnick

It was a bad trade, so I do understand why — We also acquired before I joined the board NSX, which was sort of Madoff’s exchange which had its…

Catherine Clay

It’s not reputational issues maybe?

Steve Sosnick

Yeah, so the compliance costs were enormous and so I understand why they did it and the BATS merger made much more sense, but I digress. But anyway, so tell me how you see the crypto fitting in with the equity and derivatives product mix that you have.

Catherine Clay

Yeah, I mean, you know we really like to start our product portfolio with cash equities and then we typically list derivatives on top of that and that’s really the game plan. If we do it inorganically, organically CBOE is after all a derivatives exchange. And while we’ve grown tremendously into FX and growing our equities business, we really land on derivatives, and we did release European derivative contracts last September created off our own indices not partnered with any partner and so we do it organically and inorganically. But global expansion, expansion of asset classes, they all make sense to us. It’s not a huge deviation from I think what we do on a daily basis. Certainly, the digital asset space has its own nuances and it’s a lot to learn because there are differences. But if we still go back to where we started this conversation about dotcom era and subsequent bust you can certainly draw some parallels between what happened then and what’s happening now in in crypto.  But we believe that without the regulatory clarity that we need, without getting some of the speculation out, without getting rid of some of the protocols in projects that just need to be getting rid of, we won’t really see the growth in the industry that we want.

And we do think that we’re going to get the regulatory clarity and ambiguity would be squeezed out.  And just like after the dotcom bust, a lot of those companies didn’t survive, but there were many that did, and they actually fuel a lot of our economy today.

Steve Sosnick

You mentioned the analogies with the dotcom era. and which is when we met, of course. But basically, there’s so many parallels. As you mentioned, the most important Internet companies didn’t exist during the dotcom era. The ones that drove the dotcom era, the original ones were Netscape, AOL. You know these companies are — If they exist, they’re shadows of themselves.

So I think I understand your strategy completely, which is hoping for and working toward regulatory clarity because what we’re seeing now, what we’ve seen in some of the recent blowups … that’s the direct result of a lack of regulatory clarity or a lack of regulation. You know, deregulation works, lack– I shouldn’t say deregulation. Lack of regulation works great until it doesn’t.

Catherine Clay

Right, but if you think back to the dotcom era, I mean these were securities publicly traded, listed on exchanges and a lot of people lost a lot of money in that bust of the dotcom stocks. A lot of people made a lot of money on the way up and lost on the way down and that’s a regulated market, so we will get regulation clarity eventually in this space, and I think these incidents like Celsius more recently, is going to actually just add fuel to the fire, put some heat on the on the feet of the regulators to get some of this ambiguity out of the marketplace.

But I think at the end of the day we will see companies come out of what’s happening today… protocols that will survive and many more that will not, but it will fuel the future growth of our business. Whether it’s decentralized social media, whatever the forward look is going to be, it’s not going to be what it was.

Steve Sosnick

Well, I agree with that completely because I think the idea of recreating 18th century colonial banks that issued their own currency, and then vanished sometimes, just doing it on a bigger scale is not wise. On the other hand, you know we ended up getting the FDIC and SIPC and yes, as you recognized, we haven’t outlawed volatility. For better or worse, people still make and lose money and I don’t think that ever should go away and I think that people should take advantage of the products that, shall we say certain organizations offer, that help some people manage risk, you know? But it’s going to be an interesting evolution, and so I’m curious to see how you how you handle that going forward. Do you see this blending into your mix of products over time?

Catherine Clay

I do, but we’re CBOE.  We’re highly regulated, we’re going to take a very thoughtful path towards digital assets, just the fact that the acquisition we made in the space is ErisX. It’s not widely known it’s not an FTX, or Binance by any stretch, but ErisX was built with the regulatory framework market in mind. So, everything done from the ground up at ErisX is to comply with what we think the future regulatory regime will look like, and so we think it will be a competitive differentiator for us to have a digital asset, exchange clearing and custody solution that is very comfortable with the regulators looking inside.  We’re fully transparent about what we’re doing there, and we hope it will give the end investor a lot of confidence that the markets are high integrity in the digital asset space.

And by the way, if we circle back to the dotcom era, you hear the same sort of things you hear people say, “Well, I don’t even know how to value this. How do I value? I don’t even know what it’s worth.”  But you know that for a fact ’cause we were on the phone during dotcom era. When it came to broker, coming into the cloud, whether it was Netscape or DoubleClick, or AOL and they would ask to make a market right? And let’s say I gave a market like those calls are… the Feb. 100 calls are 3 bid at 3 ½ and they would say “Sold at three. What’s your market out?” And then I’m like, “Oh my gosh” and we would absolutely invert the market just to get those back and de-scalp ourselves sometimes. So there was no knowing what those companies were worth.

Steve Sosnick

Oh absolutely, because we were so risk averse sometimes because the vols [volatilities] were so high in those. I don’t think I’m spilling any secrets all these years later. Our model was essentially… there was a risk component that was based on volatility and the vols were so high we didn’t take a ton of risk. So, if you bought a big slug of one of those highly volatile names, it would blow up the models and your–

Catherine Clay

Steve, it wasn’t even a big slug. It wasn’t even a big slug.

Steve Sosnick

You beat me to it. A big slug could have been a 25 lot actually. We were ten up and I remember being on the phone with you and with Eglit back in the early days when we listed Netscape because the vols were so high. We were specialists and I don’t think we could do a 10 lot without basically going bid to offer, offer to bid, or worse.

Catherine Clay

Bid through offer.

Steve Sosnick

Yeah, exactly.

Catherine Clay

 Yeah, offer through bid, it was ridiculous, so I just laugh when I hear people say “I’m not gonna. I don’t trust cryptocurrencies because I don’t know how to value” I’m like “and neither did we in the dotcom. How are you going to value in Netscape?” “What’s the value of that you know?” The speculators will get sort of flushed out for a while. We might have a crypto winter here, but this will survive in some way, shape or form, and there will be winners and maybe they’re not out in the market yet, but they’re coming.

Steve Sosnick

Well, the one other comment I heard you know, one of the bank executives made the comment that all money will be digital and I’m going to argue all money already is digital.

Catherine Clay

It is.

Steve Sosnick

Well, the vast majority, except for the cash in your wallet, stock stocks are digital, you know? Yeah, there’s probably a few stock certificates floating around in peoples’ safe deposit boxes, but stocks are digital, options are completely digital.  The vast majority of money that moves from place to place is digital, why wouldn’t Blockchain be an adaptation of that?  I’m not the guy to say what that adaptation is, but if you’re going to say were going to put all this stuff in a ledger that continually grows and whether it’s decentralized or whether it’s semi-decentralized, it’s a protocol. It’s a protocol for organizing all this digitalization, and I would be optimistic that an exchange that’s already doing something like that would be able to figure out how to take the next step.

Catherine Clay

Yeah, I mean that is part of it too. There is this idea that we have to continue to grow, innovators dilemma. You don’t just stop doing what you’ve done well all these years and not pay attention to some of the emerging technologies that blockchain and different kinds of blockchain bring to the conversation.

Steve Sosnick

I’m going to shift gears a little bit. You are known around the street now, as one of the top female exchange executives. Yeah, I can’t even get in your shoes in that regard, you know?  So, tell the listeners, many of whom are middle-aged dudes like me or younger what it’s like?  The challenges that you faced and how in getting to where you are and the stuff that you that you may still see on a daily basis.

Catherine Clay

I mean I’m very fortunate that I felt very at home in a male dominated environment. I think maybe because, even though I didn’t have brothers, I had two sisters growing up, I played sports at a very early age. Whether it was Little League or pickup basketball games, or, you know, I was very comfortable in that environment and I’m very just competitive because of being an athlete. So, stepping on a trading floor where there might have been I think 550 members at that time, about 12 were women. I was one of those, so for me it’s been very comfortable, and I feel very at home in the environment that I’ve been, in and exposed to, and blessed to be in.

But I do recognize that not all women feel that way and so I can tell you that women today still do suffer from unconscious bias in meetings and settings, and I see it and I try to call it out.  The difference is that my male colleagues seem to also be caring more about that phenomenon and helping to fix that phenomenon, but there’s more work to do.

There’s not enough senior… the fact that I get called out for being a senior executive in the financial space. I really hope for the day where that my gender is not even mentioned in these conversations because it’s just so pervasive. We’re not there so there’s more wood to chop.

Steve Sosnick

If it’s notable for me to mention it, it shouldn’t be notable for me to mention it. You should just be EVP at the CBOE, not one of the top female exchange people around. Hopefully we can get past all the labels, but I will say it’s light years better than it was when we started, so….

Catherine Clay

It is, it’s improving, you know I feel like the progress is never fast enough when you’re trying to see true progress, but we have to acknowledge the progress that has been made and we have to continue to do the things that get us better in the DNI space in general. It’s not just women, it’s people of color and other diverse hires that we really need to be thinking about in our organizations. And I am a true believer that stronger companies have a more diverse makeup and different opinions, different ways of thinking are much better for a company performance, and I believe there are.

You’re a Jeopardy champion, then you should be able to cite…

Steve Sosnick

Now everybody is going to be Googling that.

Catherine Clay

You should be able to cite some specific study that it has been done on the strength of diversity and companies, because I think there’s a lot about how stock prices even do better, you name it so.

Steve Sosnick

I think everybody does better. The more diversity, the more diverse, the better. I think of how far we’ve come as a business from when it was just, you know, a bunch of dudes on a trading floor. You know if you get to embedded in one way of thinking, you’re doomed. I think that’s a big part. I think that’s a big problem.

Catherine Clay

One of the one of the things I’m most blessed to be involved with is a nonprofit called The Greenwood Project here in Chicago and it is a nonprofit to help underprivileged kids find their path in financial services.

Steve Sosnick

Oh, that sounds awesome.

Catherine Clay

It’s really amazing. They place hundreds of interns; they call them scholars and they carry them all through high school and follow them to college and help get them placed in careers. And we’ve had a few of The Greenwood Project interns here at CBOE, but we actually have an alumnus from the Greenwood project that now works at CBOE. It’s just a fantastic organization and group.

Steve Sosnick

That’s something really to be proud of. Was the CBOE involved in it before you moved to Chicago or is this something you found on your own?

Catherine Clay

I can’t take any credit for it.  We have a great team here that runs all of our charity and fundraising called CBOE Empowers. They’ve been working with this group for a while, but we’ve become financial donors and I’m lucky to sit on the board now and get to see all the great progress that they’re making.

Steve Sosnick

Well, I for one will be looking this up when we’re done with the call

Catherine Clay

Please do.

Steve Sosnick

And I encourage everybody listening to do that ’cause that sounds phenomenal. You know in a city like Chicago to get everything, the more people you can get involved the better.

How would you like to finish it up? Because you know, I’m going to throw this open to you.  What have we missed?  Or what do you want people to know? I’m glad we got in the charity thing before we ran out of time, so please, if there are anything that you want to add before we kind of wrap it up.

Catherine Clay

You know, I can’t think of what we may have left out. I mean, I think we covered it all except to say that good luck to Dave Eglit.  He has to follow us so, you know, that’s how I’ll leave it.

Steve Sosnick

Well, good luck to him because this is going to be a tough one for him to follow and, but you know you had to follow him once. Now he’s got to follow you and it’s going to be a lot harder.

Catherine Clay

That’s right, well, you know, and all credits and I gotta give Dave a shoutout. He took a chance on me because I had no idea what was happening on that trading floor, but maybe he saw something in me, and he took a chance on hiring me. So, I do have to give Dave Eglit a shout out for giving me a start in this great financial services field.

Steve Sosnick

Yeah, I think though the rest of the credit can go to you for running with the shot, so I think we’ll leave it there.

Catherine Clay

Alright.

Steve Sosnick

That’s a great way to wrap it up. For all of you have been listening, thank you so much. As you know, my guest has been Catherine Clay, EVP at the CBOE and I hope we get a chance to do this again. This was a lot of fun, Cathy.

Catherine Clay

I’m so happy you had me on.

Thanks Steve so much.

Steve Sosnick

OK, everybody we’ll talk to you soon. Thanks. Bye-bye.