Stacey Cunningham: feeling the heat on the trading floor and in the kitchen

Stacey Cunningham, chief operating officer at the New York Stock Exchange, reaches up among a long row of silver pots, pans and ladles hanging from a rack in the industrial kitchen of the exchange’s in-house restaurant. Watermelon, bunches of rocket, ginger root, uncooked rice and a few courgette flowers sit in a metal tray, ingredients for a meal Cunningham is preparing, drawing on a lifelong love of cooking and a stint at culinary school — a mid-career tangent from a decade ago.

Is she preparing her favourite meal this evening? “I typically like to slow cook, so I do a lot of barbecue and pulled pork and things that take 18 hours or so,” she says, unwrapping the main course — a 2lb reddish-pink snapper — and rubbing her fingers over it to make sure the scales are off.

Rather than subject me to an 18-hour session in the kitchen — or herself to an 18-hour interview — she is making a grilled peach and burrata appetiser, Thai-spiced snapper with coconut rice, and a watermelon and feta salad. She has picked the menu partly because it is a warm spring day in New York, but also to test herself. “Fish is not my forte, so I decided I was going to go outside of my comfort zone,” she says.

Cunningham, 42, is the second most senior person at NYSE, in charge of making sure things run smoothly at the largest exchange in the world’s biggest equity market. That includes not only engaging in high-level discussions with regulators on whether the overall market plumbing is up to snuff, but also working to make sure NYSE’s own in-house network of human traders and super-fast computers are doing what they should.

When things go awry it can get ugly. NYSE took some heat when a bout of selling one day in the summer of 2015 resulted in intense volatility and trading halts for more than 1,000 securities. The industry and NYSE have since made rule changes in the hope of shoring up the system. NYSE has traded an average of 1.5 billion shares daily this year — about a fifth of the market — and has close to 800 employees.

On the evening we meet, the exchange is celebrating its 225th anniversary. For many people, the trading floor is virtually synonymous with Wall Street; that’s where the pageantry of listing-day ceremonies takes place, when newly minted public companies ring the opening bell. Being listed on NYSE still has a cachet, even with young companies in new industries. Earlier this year NYSE lured Snap, the owner of the messaging app Snapchat, to list on its exchange over that of its rival Nasdaq, and it has made inroads in recent years in wooing other hot new tech companies.

Far from resting on its laurels, NYSE is also in the middle of a large-scale technological revamp, spearheaded by Cunningham, aiming to bring all of its five trading venues on to the same system.

A decade ago, it was a different story, as Cunningham knows well. She had joined the trading floor in the 1990s as a “specialist” for JJC (later a unit of Bank of America), where she eventually handled the shares of companies such as Hershey Foods and Ambac Financial. Her job was to facilitate trading in certain stocks by displaying best bids and offers, and to maintain orderly markets in those stock by, if necessary, putting up the firm’s own capital.

By 2005, the financial markets were on the verge of a technological revolution, with computers ultimately replacing much of open outcry trading. But for Cunningham, about a decade into her career, the pace of change wasn’t rapid enough. “The trading floor back then was still entirely manual but the market had moved past that, and we hadn’t yet made that transition to combining technology with the floor. It felt wrong to me,” she says, grating ginger into a bowl. “If you don’t give the people on the floor the tools they need to compete in a modern environment, they are not going to be successful.”

She didn’t take the decision to leave NYSE lightly; it took her about a year to commit to the move in 2005. She enrolled in a nine-month programme at the Institute of Culinary Education in Manhattan, which required six weeks working in a restaurant. Cunningham spent hers at Ouest, a neighbourhood favourite on the Upper West Side that shut down in 2015. The kitchen’s high-pressure atmosphere, the air filled with yelling and irreverent jokes, was not unfamiliar to her.

“The environment was so much like the trading floor,” says Cunningham. “Things that would not be OK in really any other place tend to be OK on the trading floor and in the restaurant kitchen.

“The way you interact with your co-workers during stress — everyone knows not to take it personally, for the most part. On the floor you might in the heat of the moment be aggressively fighting over a trade, and at the end of the day go grab a beer together.”

Things that would not be OK in any other place tend to be OK on the trading floor and in a kitchen

Another lesson from the trading floor was to take responsibility for mistakes and remedy them quickly. “You own it, you fix it, you move on,” she says. “You really don’t have time to deal with it any other way and you are more likely just to make it worse.”

By now, Cunningham has moved on to slicing watermelon for the salad and then quickly chopping basil and coriander into tiny pieces with a large chef’s knife, pulling away her fingers just in time — all without skipping a beat in the conversation. She says that one of the things that made her good at her job was the ability to do more than one thing at a time.

“I don’t know if I developed it on the trading floor, or maybe I was effective [there] because I have [that skill],” she says. “I can listen to three conversations, not be following them, but it is almost like my mind records them and plays them back.”

Like many who have worked at the exchange, Cunningham says it took just one visit to the floor to get her hooked. She spent a summer as an intern when she was studying engineering at Lehigh University. “I was actually trying to get a job waitressing, and they wouldn’t hire me because I didn’t have experience,” she says. Her father, who worked at a brokerage, got her the gig.

“I just fell in love with the floor,” she says. “As soon as I walked out there I thought, this is what I want to do.”

While many others have been shuttered, NYSE has retained its physical trading floor, opting for a combination of humans and computers doing the trading. “We are investing in the floor,” says Cunningham. “There were many people who were surprised that Intercontinental Exchange [which bought NYSE in 2012] was getting into the trading floor business, since they have a history of shutting down trading floors. But it didn’t take long to understand that the NYSE floor was unique for a number of reasons. Issuers like the comfort of knowing there is a human being overseeing the trading, so ICE embraced that pretty quickly, but they’re also a very technologically savvy organisation, so we took the best of both worlds and are incorporating them.”

Cunningham has made her mark in a series of male-dominated fields: engineering school, the trading floor and the professional kitchen. Was that something she felt aware of at the time?

“I never acted as though there was a question as to whether or not I should be where I was. And then, I belonged on the floor,” she says. “When I look back I think I took some things for granted.”

She refers to Muriel Siebert, the first woman to own a seat on the NYSE, which allowed her to trade on the floor. “If she hadn’t done that, if she hadn’t said, ‘I’m not allowed to be there, but I am going to just go do it anyway’, I never would have been able to walk on the trading floor without thinking about it. And I never gave it a thought.”

Later that evening, Cunningham will take me to a room at the exchange named after Siebert, who died in 2013. Among the items showcased there are a photograph of women trading on the floor during the second world war and Siebert’s trading floor jacket, made of multicoloured fur. When she bought her seat in 1967, there was no ladies’ bathroom in the luncheon club, the members-only space that encompassed the entire seventh floor. The exchange ultimately made one for her by converting a telephone booth. (It was still there when Cunningham left in 2005.)

After two years off, Cunningham was ready to go back to Wall Street. She took a job at NYSE’s rival Nasdaq before returning to the company in 2012. She was promoted to COO in 2015. While she admits that she was lucky to return so quickly to the industry she loves, she also says that she didn’t second-guess her decision, nor worry too much about getting back into the workforce.

“I just don’t think your career is linear,” she says. “I didn’t think it was going to be a problem to take time off and I didn’t think it was going to be an issue coming back in. I felt like I learnt a lot from my time away. Your skills are transportable.”

The fish comes out of the oven. Cunningham gives it a few pokes with her finger to make sure it is done. One area feels a little soft, so a thermometer comes out as the final test.

She urges me to rip off a piece of bread and scoop up some of the spice rub left in pan. “The best part,” she says. “So tasty.”

Cunningham says she still uses skills from the kitchen in her current job. “When you work in a kitchen you have to communicate well,” she says. “You are trying to meet deadlines that are almost impossible at times. You need to be concise and direct — those are communication skills that I find useful in my day-to-day work now.”

But the NYSE she returned to was very different from the place she had left back in 2005 — the modernisation she had craved back then was in full swing, and continues today.

“Certainly with the adoption of so much technology, the sounds were different. There was a little bit less yelling and a lot more beeping — a lot more orders coming into handhelds versus paper writing,” she says. “But the vibe is the same. It is exciting to walk on to the trading floor.”

Nicole Bullock is the FT’s US equities correspondent

Photographs: Kacey Jeffers