Adventures of an Orthodox Jewish bond trader

Editor’s Note: This is the 37th in a series of stories researched during Don and Nancy Harrison’s 50th Wedding Anniversary cruise from Sydney, Australia, to San Diego.  Previous installments of the series, which runs every Thursday, may be found by tapping the number of the installment:1, 2,3,4, 5, 6, 7,8, 9, 10, 11, 12,13, 14,15, 16, 17, 18,19,20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36

 

AT SEA, Aboard MS Maasdam – One of the unscheduled benefits of a cruise, particularly a long one such as the 39-day voyage that Nancy and I enjoyed between Sydney, Australia, and San Diego, U.S.A., is the opportunity to meet and actually get to know fellow passengers.

In this article and the next, I will share the stories of two remarkable Jewish women whom Nancy and I met at Friday evening Erev Shabbat services aboard our Holland America Line cruise ship, and with whom we subsequently socialized during the voyage.  One is Judith Putterman, a retired Wall Street bond trader, who lives in New York City.  The other is Adrienne O’Hare, a retired psychiatric therapist from Tucson, Arizona.

Particularly on Friday nights, Judith and her husband Isaac Putterman would join us, Adrienne and her husband Larry O’Hare, and our San Diego friends, Robert and Helaine Baum, for dinner at which we enjoyed not only the regular menu items but also the kosher wine, challah and gefilte fish left over from the immediately preceding oneg Shabbat.

I asked Judith Putterman whether it was more difficult for her on Wall Street as a woman or as an Orthodox, Shomer Shabbos Jew.  Both presented their challenges, she responded, but of the two, being a Sabbath-observing, kosher-keeping Orthodox Jew definitely was the more difficult test.

She told me that she had worked 10 years in the children’s book publishing business before she went to graduate school to earn an MBA at Columbia University.  In a 25-year career on Wall Street, she was initiated to the adrenaline rushes of bond trading at the firm of Mabon, Nugent & Co., and subsequently took on more and more responsibility at Kidder, Peabody & Co., Oppenheimer & Co., and Mizuho Americas.  Along the way, she served as the managing director of the financial firms’ corporate bonds departments.

Friday afternoons were the most difficult times, Putterman recalled.  Trading bonds “is a business where time is of the essence,” she told me during a shipboard interview.  “It’s not like publishing where you might say, ‘I’m tired; I can’t see anymore.  I’ll proofread it tomorrow, or I’ll take it home with me.’  It’s got to be done, but here I am, having to leave early on Fridays in the winter, so someone else has to take care of my stuff for me.  Somebody else has to answer the phone for me, and there are decisions that have to be made.  I don’t know what is going to blow up on Friday when I am leaving at 3 o’clock, which in those days was one hour before the trading day was over.  I want to get home before Shabbos; sometimes I only get home five minutes before candle lighting, and this is very, very hard to do.”

Putterman’s need to leave early every Friday afternoon, coupled with her taking off for Jewish holidays, caused resentment at her firm among other traders.  In addition, she said, “I was an MBA but there was still a generation of guys who came out of high school, went to work on some trading floor, and had worked their way up,” she recalled.  “I didn’t work my way up.  I came right up to the trading floor.  And I was a woman.  There was a whole layer of resentment.”

One day, the resentment boiled over.  A male colleague screamed at her “You take off early on Fridays and Jewish holidays, and you are not worth it!”  The insult was heard all over the office, but the next day another male colleague approached her and said, “I want you to know that we were all mortified to hear that.”

Based on her trading record, she was promoted to the position of senior trader.  She had a male junior trader working for her, who without checking with her first had scheduled a Caribbean vacation with his wife.  Unfortunately, he had picked dates that fell right in the middle of Jewish holidays.  Needing her assistant to be there at that time, Putterman told him that she was sorry, but he had to change his vacation dates.  “I know that cost him money, so that was very difficult,” she said.

Although this didn’t happen to Putterman, there was always the chance that people who cover for you at a trading house might out of spite intentionally cause problems.  Putterman had heard the story of an Orthodox Jewish trader at another firm who taken his children to Florida the Christmas holidays.  “Somebody covering his position made a ‘mistake’ and sold or bought at the wrong time,” she related.  “They got him, they nailed him.”

To guard against such a situation, Putterman always volunteered to work Christmas week.  “I would be the first one there and I left the last because I knew this was someone else’s holiday, and I owed a lot of people,” she said.  “Later on, when I was the most senior person, I would send everyone home before New Year’s Eve and I would take care of all the phones, everything.  Some of the juniors said, ‘No, we have to stay on, and I said, ‘No, you don’t.’  I tried very hard to make it up.   Of course, Christmas Day the market is closed, and it’s also closed on Good Friday.”

Still, there were times when being Jewish was disadvantageous.  Once at Mabon Nugent, she recalled, a senior trader was about to meet with a large Dutch insurance company, and asked Putterman to accompany him because of her knowledge about bonds.  “One of the salesmen came over screaming, ‘You’re sending a Jewish woman.  Are you crazy?   You can’t do that.  You have to send Brophy.”  His concern was that the Dutch company might not relate well either to a woman or to a Jew.

At Kidder Peabody, Putterman continued to take off on Shabbat and on Jewish holidays, and if any of her superiors questioned what impact that would have, she responded, “It’s not going to make a difference.  Everything is going to be taken care of.  Everything will be under control and you will never know the difference.”

Kidder Peabody had branches all around the country, and Putterman would visit the various branches to discuss the nuances of bond trading with the salespeople there.  “Typically, I had to take out the best salesmen, and where did they want to go?  To a steakhouse where the only thing I could eat was a baked potato, or a salad, and a piece of corn.  Otherwise there was nothing for me to eat, but that is what you have got to do.”

After she moved to Oppenheimer, where she was manager of all corporate bond sales and trading, she visited the branch in St. Louis, where the branch manager insisted that she join him after work at a backyard barbecue.  “He takes me out to the back yard, where he has a grill, covered with foil, and a huge piece of salmon.  He says, ‘Is this okay?’ and I said, ‘Yes, this is okay.’  They bent over backwards to take care of this, but I felt terrible because I was putting people out.  I didn’t want people to think that I felt entitled; this wasn’t the usual way things were done.”

Still later in her career, she went to Mizuho, which was a firm that had been formed by several Japanese banks.  Putterman’s boss came to her one day and said she would be needed in Tokyo the following Monday.  Typically, her colleagues would leave New York on a Saturday, arrive late Sunday, and then go to the Monday meetings.  However, “I said ‘to get there I have to leave before Shabbos; I have to leave on a Wednesday.’”  Her boss responded, “I don’t care if you leave a week before; I just need you there on a Monday.”  So, she left on a Wednesday, arrived on a Friday, and had the weekend to walk around Tokyo before her meetings.  “On Saturday, I must have walked 10 miles, and then on Sunday two of the Japanese guys I was working with came and got me and gave me a tour. By Monday, I had seen a lot of Tokyo.  And the Japanese were impressed by the fact that I had spent time there, because all the others just flew in and flew out.”

One of the big draws in Tokyo are restaurants that serve very expensive Kobe beef, which can run up the cost of a dinner to $500.  “I said I wanted vegetarian, and their faces fell,” Putterman said.  Sometime later, the Japanese colleagues came to New York and Putterman invited them to her upper West Side apartment for dinner.  Meat eaters, they were worried that she would serve only vegetables. They were happily surprised when Putterman served a brisket and roast beef.  Her boss also attended the dinner, making a request beforehand.  He wanted latkes.  So, she served that too, with her boss taking home helpings for his family.

Asked whether women approach the job of bond trading differently than men do, Putterman said that a lot of their male colleagues would “sit at their desk with their arms folded when it was quiet, because they were big shots.”  During her quiet periods, she said, “I would call salesmen in branches around the country, asking “What are you doing?  What is going on?” She would build relationships with the salespeople.

On one occasion, she said, she scheduled a trip to Chicago to meet the sales force there, and “a guy in the corner office said to me, ‘You are going to love going to Chicago.  You walk around the Miracle Mile, you go shopping ….’

Shopping was hardly what she had in mind.  “I was in the Chicago office at 6 a.m. and I worked until nighttime. I visited every single salesman in that office, every single one,” she recalled.  “At the end of the day, the head of the branch, which is a significant position, had his secretary come to me and say that he wanted to see me.  “He says, ‘Do you have time for dinner?’  I said ‘Sure.’  He took me to dinner with a couple of the sales managers, and said to me, ‘I just wanted you to know that I didn’t ask you to dinner until the end of the day because I thought your whole visit would be a waste of time because guys come in from New York, say hello to their buddies, and then disappear.  I’ve never seen anybody come to an office and work a room like that!’

“‘Okay, fine,’ I thought, so I ate my carrots and my corn.”

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Harrison is editor of San Diego Jewish World.  He may be contacted via donald.harrison@sdjewishworld.com