BUILT TO LAST

Totality chief executive Adam Smith has a knack for scaling small operations. He tells Karren Vergara why the financial markets are as exciting as ever and how he's taking the trading platform to the next level.

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The 1980s captured the zeitgeist of the financial markets like no other thanks to Oliver Stone's iconic movie Wall Street.

The Black Monday crash and Paul Keating floating the Australian dollar are two other pivotal timestamps of that decade.

In 1986, when Adam Smith was in high school, he attended a careers expo. He didn't know what floating the dollar meant so he started doing some homework and asked a stockbroker at the expo.

"[The stockbroker] told me about it and said some interesting things about finance. That helped in the university and courses choices I made," he says, recalling that amid the 1987 stock market crash the Dow Jones fell nearly 23% in one day and made front-page news.

"All these things confirmed for me that finance is an interesting industry that I might want to be part of it in the future."

After earning a Bachelor of Economics at Sydney University, Smith joined Macquarie Group in what was then called the "equities group" that included stockbroking and capital raising.

"It also included the equity derivatives business, which was sort of embryonic at that stage," he says.

"That business was very interesting to me. It included the trading of equity structured products, warrants, equity futures, shares and ETFs, but they weren't known as ETFs back then but a type of listed product."

Macquarie's option trading pit on Bond Street, Sydney had a quantitative applications division and was one of the first options trading teams that printed prices for stocks.

"The rest of the market used to look over their shoulder to try and see what was on their sheets of paper. So, it was an exciting time to be in the markets. It drove my passion for being involved in the markets and it was a great introduction," he says.

Smith enjoyed the learning, practical application and commercialising those ideas.