Celebrating 25 Years of the John Lothian Newsletter – A Leap of Faith in 1999

Standing Out in 1999 Led to a Career Standing Up For The Markets Twenty-five years ago, in August 1999, I began producing this daily newsletter as a marketing and networking tool to promote my electronic trading brokerage services, Commodity Trading Advisor offerings, and my personal brand. I was competing with large discount commodity firms that were transitioning to electronic trading, and I needed to market myself and my firm and find a way to stand out, but I didn’t have many monetary resources to do so. Therefore, I had to think outside the box. My specific goals at the time were to increase the number of my brokerage clients at The Price Futures Group, to raise funds for Defender Capital Management and Hargrave Financial Group, two CTAs I represented, and to elevate my profile amid industry changes that I felt could undermine my career path. I feared that the introduction of single stock futures could change the face of the industry, potentially making standalone introducing brokers like The Price Group obsolete. I wanted to learn as much as possible about SSFs and share this information. I was also concerned about the impact of electronic trading on open outcry trading and its related careers, and I wanted my friends and colleagues in the industry to be aware of the risks they were facing. Additionally, I worried that backlash from competing brokers over my participation in the ‘wild west’ of the internet—Usenet, the Reddit of its day—might damage my reputation. My hope was to address both my goals and my fears in a positive way that would benefit myself and my community. My specific strategy for the newsletter was unique. I wanted to experiment with something called a weblog and a concept called viral marketing. The weblog was created in 1997. By combining these two elements, I aimed to create a publication that would gather all the information I could find about the changes occurring in the industry, compile it into a single email, and send it to clients, colleagues, leads, acquaintances, and others. In the early days of the internet I had seen some incredibly successful examples of viral marketing, including one for the online brokerage firm National Discount Brokers that had involved a quacking duck.  The pace of change in the industry was so rapid in those days that no publication could keep up with the constant flow of news. None of the weekly or biweekly newsletters seemed able to meet the challenge. In the meantime, there was too much risk. My own risk as the head of electronic trading was increasing as well, since I was with an introducing broker outside of our futures commission merchant, Man Financial. Man Financial was mostly staffed with second-in-command executives from acquired firms who lacked a clear vision for handling the industry’s changes. Too often, when memos from the exchanges landed in their inboxes, they simply went unnoticed, rather than being shared with the rest of the firm and its clients. I decided to take a proactive approach and seek out the information myself. I would find, aggregate,