I grew up in the south side of Chicago. I came from absolutely nothing and I thought I had the world. It was a great way of life. My mom and dad were very blue-collar. Most of my neighbors were all firemen or policemen. We lived in the city and one day I was fortunate enough when I was going to college up in Wisconsin to meet a guy and he said, 'I like the way you think. Why don't you come on down to the exchange?' I don't even know what the exchange was. Came down to the CME, fell in love with it, left college, became a runner on the exchange for $56 a week. And from there, I convinced my mom and dad to go ahead and co-sign their bungalow in the city for their 21-year-old son to become a trader. I lost that house in about a week and lost another 100 grand within the week after. And it was a real interesting time to be 21 years of age in 1981 and no money. I had a great guy stand behind me and he said one day, 'Terry, what I'm going to do is I'm going to help you.' I thought, thank God, bail me out. He goes, 'I'm not giving you a penny.' I said, 'That's not what I want to hear.' He says, 'I'm going to give you my reputation.' The guy's name was Vincent Triber. He has since passed away, but as some of these gentlemen will know, Vince was a great legacy trader in Chicago and his reputation was better than money. So the clearing house took Vince's reputation and he called my mother and said, 'Barb, you're not going to lose the house. I'm going to guarantee it, but he'll get three jobs and he'll pay it off.' It really taught me a great deal of respect and discipline. And from then on going forward, I really thought about where's my exit strategy before my entry point ever came into the market. So I always thought that way going early on in life and it helped me out the rest of my career. And then from there I got more involved in the exchange and got involved in the politics of the country club as we like to refer to it back then because we were not a public company. We were an exchange owned by its members and I was one of the members. So I was one of the governing officials of the exchange because we owned it. We took it public in 2002. We didn't like the management and we were looking for somebody to lead the IPO and when we drew straws, mine was the shortest one. They said, 'You're chairman. You take us to lead IPO.' I said, 'Okay, I'll do it. I'm not quite sure how it's going to turn out, but I'll give it my best shot.' So, we took the company public in '02 at $35 a share. We were fortunate. We locked up our members for about a year and a half and the stock traded upwards of $200 a share, then ultimately to $700 a share. So members that held their stock that was worth anywhere from 400,000 to 500,000 was worth $10 million per person in a couple of years. So people thought I had all the answers. I had a lot of luck and good timing. But from then on, they asked me to stay on and become chairman and become the executive chairman and president of the firm. And I did that and then we did a lot of M&A activity. We acquired the Chicago Board of Trade back in 2007. Was a great merger of equals. And today it's worked out very well because if we didn't do that transaction, we would not be here today. One of us would have been gone. And then in 2008, timing is everything as they say. We acquired the New York Mercantile Exchange for a very large number of $12 billion and then the crisis hit. So you can imagine what that was like. But we also bought an energy asset class which got very red hot for us and actually saved us. So we went from there and that's been my path going forward. I spend a lot of my time in Washington DC and I like to tell Congress a lot and tell other people the bad thing about this country right now is when you land at Dulles airport and one of the great perks I get because I don't ask for a lot. One I have is an airplane. Well, when I land I'm not Don, he has his own. I got to rent mine. But when we land, I see so many corporate jets. And through 2008, 2009, 2010, when Dodd-Frank was being written, I saw more corporate jets at Dulles airport than I did at Teterboro, which is the busiest general aviation airport in the world. It's right outside of New York City. That's where they should be. They should not be in Washington DC. A very perverse thing was happening. Washington was running the businesses of the United States of America and they were completely unqualified. Now the crisis was a problem and we did need to have some new laws put in place but to have Washington say 'mother may I' on everything we could do is a recipe for disaster. Well, here we are in 2014. I've had the pleasure of testifying probably 40 to 50 times over the last 10 years and it's been interesting. But the world's in a better place today because of Dodd-Frank. Even though the law isn't that good, you had to have something though because if we didn't, we would have blown ourselves up for sure. One of the things I like to tell people is we're really losing the best and brightest. You see on the screen behind me, the best and brightest. I wrote an op-ed a couple years ago saying that Wall Street is losing its best and brightest and people thought I was nuts. Everybody on the East Coast wanted to go work on Wall Street. Nobody wants to work on Wall Street anymore. Everybody thinks Wall Street's some kind of a cancer. It is so important for Wall Street to be viable because if Wall Street is not viable, I will assure you there is no such thing as Main Street. Main Street cannot exist without Wall Street. It doesn't mean because Wall Street is not just a strip of a small street where the New York Stock Exchange is at. Wall Street is known as commerce and commerce is critically important. Whether it's being held in Wall Street or whether it's being held on Main Street, it's still what is designated as commerce. So that's very important. So we need to draw that distinction. So I go around a lot of universities. I spoke at Georgetown. They actually invited me back. I was quite surprised. I only swore once, so that was really good. But I enjoy speaking to students and for a lot of reasons. I think that a lot of young people have vision that's this close. And I'm not saying it's wrong. It's just something that has happened. And what's important as you look and go forward to your careers is if your friend's making $50,000 and you got a job for 40, you're thinking, 'Shit, I want another 10 grand.' Take a look where that $40,000 bucks might take you. That $40,000 might be DRW Trading, might be the head of the CME Group someday. You don't know where it's going to go. That 50 grand might stop at 55. So that's what I like to tell young people a lot. Look, take a deep look at where you could possibly go. And I think if you don't do that and you take the nearsighted approach and it's hard not to do so, you'll be sorry. So I'd like to tell young people a lot, take a good look at what you're doing. Don't worry about who's making what. Take a 5, 10, 15 year approach at your age, not a two or three minute approach like some people do. So our industry which these guys are going to talk about also has been very dynamic. The growth has been extraordinary. When I took over CME in '02 we had a little over $60 million in the bank. We traded about 300,000 contracts a day. Today we trade 14 million contracts a day. We're a $2 billion market cap company and the industry has grown by leaps and bounds. It's grown by electronification of the marketplace. It's grown by exchanges working with clients, clients working with other firms and the whole ecosystem has grown dramatically. It is a dynamic industry whether you're in the derivatives or other parts of the financial services industry. I urge you to take a deep look at it because the future is going to be very bright. One of the things that this country has going for it, I'm a big believer in this. If we have the safety and soundness of marketplaces and other countries invest in us, that helps us grow jobs. That's what's important. That's why it's important to tell Congress, that's why it's important to tell your neighbors, we need to have a strong financial services sector. People want to put a billion dollars into a bank and the next day they want to know what's going to be there. And then they want to put a trillion dollars into a bank and they want to make sure it's going to be there. When real estate values are going up all around the world or here in the United States, you go, 'Who's buying them?' I'm not buying them. My neighbor's not buying them. No, there's people in other countries that are concerned about their own governmental economics that they'll say, 'I'm going to invest something in the United States of America.' That's a great position to be in. We shouldn't exploit it, but we should also not turn it away. So, I hope you take a good hard look at it, John. Thank you very much, folks. Thank you very much.
