They were gestures of sympathy and support to a Chicago Board of Trade broker whose fast-track firm, Cantor Fitzgerald, lost most of its headquarters staff in Tuesday’s attack on the World Trade Center.
“There’s been an unbelievable outpouring of support toward me personally and our firm,” Walton said. “It’s probably the only thing keeping it reasonably sane.”
Roughly 700 of Cantor’s 1,000 headquarters employees, who occupied the upper floors of the World Trade Center’s north tower, are missing and believed dead. The visibly fatigued Walton declined to comment Friday about his friends and colleagues who worked there.
“We’re still holding hope that there will be miracles,” he said.
Cantor Chairman Howard Lutnick has become a visible, sometimes tearful symbol of the tragedy’s human dimensions this week. Those believed lost include his brother, Gary, and Lutnick himself might have evaded harm only because he arrived at work later than usual Tuesday.
Lutnick will need great resolve to rebuild Cantor Fitzgerald, which accounts for about a quarter of all U.S. government bond trading and in 1998 launched an electronic trading market to compete with the Board of Trade.
“It’s a huge operation and an extraordinarily successful firm,” said Jack Sandner, a former Chicago Mercantile Exchange chairman who said he has known Lutnick for 13 years. “Can they come back? Yes. Emotionally, I think it’s up to Howard.”
Lutnick has indicated he intends for Cantor to stay in the game, and cash quotes were available from Cantor when bond markets reopened Wednesday morning.
“We will not allow this tragedy to sway us from our path–while we grieve, we intend to persevere,” Lutnick said in a statement.
While Cantor’s roughly 50 employees in Chicago struggle with the loss of their co-workers in New York, employees of Chicago’s Carr Futures worried about the 69 co-workers still missing from their 140-strong World Trade Center staff.
“We’re numb, like the whole nation’s numb,” said Tom Bernicky, a Carr account executive at the Board of Trade.
Other traders have had better news about their colleagues.
Bob Pliscott, a trader for Salomon Smith Barney, worried for hours Tuesday after a conference call abruptly ended with four colleagues in a World Trade Center complex building that later collapsed.
“They said, `Oh my God, somebody blew up the World Trade Center,'” Pliscott recalled. “Then I heard someone come into their office and say, `We are evacuating.'”
He “thought they were gone” until he finally reached them about 4 p.m. Tuesday.
Pliscott and his co-workers hung a U.S. flag on their Board of Trade booth Friday, relieved that the people they work with in New York are accounted for, unlike so many at Cantor Fitzgerald. “My guys do business with Cantor,” Pliscott said, “and those guys are all gone.”
