Market Wizard: From Wild West Trading Floor to Head of Citi s Rates Division: Deirdre Dunn businessinsider.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from businessinsider.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
The days of traders slamming phones and breaking computers are becoming a thing of the past. Such behavior was a frequent sight when Citigroup Inc.’s Deirdre Dunn got her start on Wall Street two decades ago. One colleague even kept a mini baseball bat in his desk to hammer his phone back together. Now, with banks desperate to attract diverse candidates to their hallowed trading floors, there’s far less tolerance for that kind of hard-charging attitude, she said. “If I look at trading when I started, I would say a phone or occasionally a computer got broken at least once a week, or once every two weeks,” Dunn, Citigroup’s global co-head of rates trading, said during a virtual roundtable last week, held ahead of International Women’s Day on Monday. “That kind of thing doesn’t happen anymore, or it rarely happens.”
Days of traders slamming phones coming to an end bworldonline.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from bworldonline.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
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Citi s interest rate derivatives team
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On a Sunday afternoon last February 23, Deirdre Dunn was driving over the newly built Kosciuszko Bridge in New York when she dialled into a conference call with Citi’s rates volatility team to discuss the fast-spreading coronavirus outbreak.
A day earlier, Italy had ordered lockdowns in 10 northern municipalities. Colleagues on the ground in Asia had been sounding the alarm for weeks. The team quickly concluded the virus posed a serious global threat.
“It was within that week that we really galvanised everyone around the scope of what we thought this crisis could bring, ” says Dunn, Citi’s co-head of rates. “[We] tried to be prepared and do what we could in order to operate cleanly and sensibly and be able to deliver for our customers in the volatility that ensued.”