Robert Cutro grew up in an Italian neighborhood in Jersey City, N.J., graduated from William L. Dickinson High School in 1964 and rode the train under the Hudson River to visit an employment agency.
Somehow he hit Wall Street.
He loved the wide-open space of the New York Stock Exchange. The throngs of screaming traders; the panic that separates the routine.
Cutro’s father told him of the 1929 crash and the pandemonium before the Great Depression. He felt the exchange floor was the stage of history.
Cutro’s weekly wage: $66.
His number came up in 1966 and he shipped to Vietnam for ordnance and demolition training at age 19.
“Tunnels, bridge abutments — anywhere they needed me to blow up things,” he said.
He returned in 1968 and pushed his way into one of the world’s most elite clubs.
Undereducated yet streetwise, small yet scrappy, he worked on the trading floor by day. At night he studied at St. Peter’s College in Jersey City, earning degrees in mathematics and economics in 1975. Cutro was named an NYSE member that same year.
“He doesn’t have a Harvard MBA,” said longtime colleague Kenny Polcari, a managing director at electronic broker ICAP. “He didn’t need one. He got home from Vietnam and worked himself up . . . with sheer grace.”
By 1977, he had purchased his own seat for $55,000, holding it through boom and bust until the exchange went public in 2006 and cashed out all seat-holders for stock.
He ran his own company and was managing director of NYSE floor operations for the brothers Salomon and Lehman.
From 1996 to 2002, Cutro served as an NYSE governor, settling trading disputes and keeping order on the often unruly trading floor. He commanded respect. Years ago, Cutro took me on the NYSE floor and seemed to know everyone.
Financial scandals make headlines each day. I asked Cutro this week: Have you ever seen anything like this?
“No,” he said. “But I also never saw anything like inflation during the Jimmy Carter days,” he said. “I never saw anything like the recession in the early 1980s with the savings and loans. I never saw anything like the 1987 crash. . . . Surely this is much bigger. There’s much more hurt. . . . But whatever happens, happens. That’s the capitalistic way.”
Wall Street as Cutro knew it is gone. Lehman is bankrupt.
Cutro says he’s been supplanted by trading technology and a new generation.
“These young kids are so smart, so articulate and so good, I don’t know if my value-add is still there,” he said.
Wednesday, he did something he hadn’t done in 45 years: He rang the closing bell, ending his career at 62.
The Dow closed up nearly 150 points that day, coming off five consecutive trading days of losses that took the index to a 12-year low on Tuesday.
“I just want to walk away while I am still feeling good about myself,” Cutro said.
He hopes to teach inner-city kids and keep lecturing at his alma mater about life’s lessons from Wall Street.
“The capitalist system in this country, it might be flawed at times,” he said, “but this is still a country where you can go — on your own — from Jersey City to Wall Street.”
Al Lewis: 201-938-5266 or al.lewis@dowjones.com
