| Notes |
The Father of Financial Futures
As a professor on sabbatical from the University of California, Berkeley in the 1970s, Sandor became the chief economist and vice president of the Chicago Board of Trade (CBOT).[10] At the CBOT, Sandor not only pioneered the first interest rate futures contract,[11] but the most widely traded and imitated interest-rate futures in the world, the Treasury bond futures contract.[12] This revolutionized the field of finance and earned him the title of "father of financial futures." Sandor originally coined the term "derivatives"[13] to describe the futures and options contracts that were traded on the Chicago exchanges. Its definition was subsequently expanded to include not only regulated products on futures transactions, but any customized product traded off the exchange, i.e. bilateral OTC transactions. Sandor was honored by the CBOT and the City of Chicago in 1992 for the creation of financial futures.
Sandor was also a strong proponent of electronic trading at a time when most exchanges favored open-outcry. In fact, he had presented the case and designed the platform for electronic trading as early as 1970 – even before the concept of electronic trading was patented.[14] At Berkeley, he was the project leader of the California Commodity Research Project (CCARP), which looked at the feasibility of establishing a for-profit, all-electronic exchange in at the time when none existed.[15] |