Nerds on Wall Street: Math, Machines, and Wired Markets

10.3. Santa Claus Is Coming to Town

What should a new online financial information firm do? Waiting for the guys at the Department of Labor to screw up again didn't seem like the best plan. We wanted to offer something new, useful to customers on both the buy side (investment managers, like me) and the sell side (brokers, market makers, and specialists). I had tried to stay in touch with the clients from the MarketMind days, who were on both sides of street, particularly the friendly and interesting ones. No one was friendlier or more interesting than John Mulheren, one of the great Wall Street characters of his era. Sadly, John died too young in 2003.

At the time of his death, John was chief executive of Bear Wagner Specialists, a firm he helped grow into one of the New York Stock Exchange's largest specialist firms. John founded the arbitrage firm Jamie Securities in the 1980s, and during the mergers and acquisitions (M&A) boom of that decade he was one of the most skillful arbitrage traders on Wall Street, reportedly making over $25 million in 1986.

The New York Times obituary for John noted that, along with a list of his many significant Wall Street accomplishments,

Mr. Mulheren cultivated a unique personality on Wall Street. A muscular man who openly displayed his emotions, he rarely wore a coat and tie, favoring instead open-necked shirts and dungarees and on special occasions, pink tuxedo shirts and camouflage pants.^[]

Although John was charged and convicted in the infamous ...