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 landed on Wall Street.
He loved the wide-open space of the New York Stock Exchange. The throngs of screaming traders. The panic that inevitably separated the many hours of routine.
His father had told him about the Crash of 1929, and the pandemonium preceding the Great Depression. He always felt that when he was on the floor of the exchange he was standing on the stage of history.
Cutro’s starting wage was $66 a week. Most people ignored his “Robert” name tag and called him “Bobby.”
His number came up in 1966. At age 19, he was shipped to Vietnam for ordinance and demolition work. “Tunnels, bridge abutments – anywhere they needed me to blow up things,” he said.
Nothing would get him down after this. “I learned to appreciate small things.”
Small, but scrappy. Undereducated, but streetwise. Cutro came back from the war in 1968 and began pushing his way into one of the most elite clubs in world.
By day, he worked on the trading floor. By night, he studied at St. Peter’s College in Jersey City, earning degrees in mathematics and economics in 1975.
“He doesn’t have a Harvard MBA,” said long-time 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.”
Cutro was named an NYSE member in 1975. And by 1977, he purchased his own seat for $55,000. He held onto this seat through boom and bust until the exchange when went public in 2006, cashing out all seat holders for stock that has taken a tumble.
He’d run his own company and worked for the brothers Salomon and Lehman. But on Wednesday, he did something he’d never done in 45 years: He rang the closing bell, marking the end of his career at age 62.
Year by year, Cutro says he’s been supplanted by trading technology and a new generation of traders.
“These young kids are so smart, so articulate and so good, I don’t know if my value-add is still there,” he said.
Fear reigns, with the market down more than 50 percent from its high. Wall Street, as Cutro knew it, is gone. Lehman, where Cutro had worked as managing director of NYSE floor operations, is bankrupt, and his division was acquired by Barclays Capital, where he last worked.
Financial scandals make headlines each day. Have you ever seen anything like this? I asked Cutro.
“No,” he said. “But I also never saw anything like inflation during the Jimmy Carter days. 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,” he continued. “There’s much more hurt But whatever happens, happens. That’s the capitalistic way.”
Cutro is a straight-up guy that I’ve known for 15 years. He’s still married to his high school sweetheart, Dyan, who has been friends with my own wife for 20 years.
Years ago, Cutro took me on the floor as his guest, and seemed to know everyone amid thousands of traders. I can’t imagine Cutro not leaping from bed and slogging through whatever was in his way, whether it was debris from 9/11 or the rabid emotions of an erratic session, to get to Wall Street.
From 1996 to 2002, Cutro served as an NYSE Governor, settling trading disputes and keeping order on the often unruly trading floor.
“He never put money first,” said Peter Kenny, managing director in institutional sales at Knight Equity Markets, whose father helped Cutro establish himself years ago. “How many people have I worked with that I can say that about?”
Kenny recalls a day in 1999 when shares of Hewlett-Packard Co. were soaring on a positive earnings surprise, stirring a mob of traders who came in a crush at the H-P specialist.
“The specialist was pinned against the counter by the influx of humanity looking to trade the stock,” Kenny said. “Bobby, who is not a terribly big person, but tough as nails, stood on the specialist’s seat and single-handily moved those 80 angry, frustrated, agitated brokers away from the post so they would resume trading in an organized fashion He commanded that kind of respect.”
As Cutro rang the bell on Wednesday, the Dow closed up nearly 150 points, 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.
From here, Cutro hopes to teach inner-city school kids and keep lecturing at his alma mater about life’s lessons learned on Wall Street. The world has changed under his feet, but Cutro is not about to lose hope.
“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
