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While police barricades cordoned off New York City's financial district following the Sept. 11 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center, never has there been a time when the borders of Wall Street stretched so far.
One example is Jefferies & Co., a small Los Angeles-based firm known primarily for its trading prowess. To get ready for last Monday's reopening of the stock market, Jefferies employees worked through the previous weekend, ensuring that the firm's trading systems and technology could handle an expected surge in volume at the New York Stock Exchange, where Jefferies is the fourth-largest floor broker, and on Nasdaq.
"Our technology team worked tirelessly to keep trading working throughout that," says John Shaw, Jefferies' president, speaking after the market's close Monday, when the Dow Jones Industrial Average slid 684.81 points, 7.13%, amid heavy trading volume. Eight out of 10 business areas are working with back-up systems, he says. The firm, which is self-clearing, maintains back-office operations in Jersey City.
No Jefferies employees were visiting the World Trade Center at the time of the attack. And Jefferies' New York City operations, situated on Madison Ave., were physically untouched by the disaster.
But the grief was there nonetheless. "There is a lot of sadness permeating throughout our firm," says Rich Handler, Jefferies CEO, describing relationships he and his colleagues shared with employees of bond trading firm Cantor Fitzgerald and investment bank Keefe, Bruyette, & Woods, Inc. Both firms, like Jefferies, are niche players well known among larger competitors in their areas of specialty.
"We are particularly shaken by the loss of friends at Cantor," says Handler, a former bond trader at Drexel Burnham Lambert, who continues to run Jefferies' fixed-income business.
Handler says Jefferies employees, for now, are immersed in trying to bring business back to normal. The firm also is providing housing to employees of one major mutual fund company client whose offices were destroyed by the attack.
Like most firms, Jefferies experienced a decline in revenues following the halt in stock market trading from Sept. 11 to Sept. 14, says Shaw. He adds that despite the blow to the financial markets, Jefferies is sticking to plans to expand its core agency trading business which involves executing stock and fixed-income orders on...