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Benedicte Gravrand, Opalesque London:

Israel (Izzy) A. Englander, a famed trader who founded the investment management firm Millennium Management LLC in 1989, has nearly 40 years of experience in dealing with securities and derivatives. Normally media-shy, he nevertheless accepted to talk to Matthias Knab in front of the Opalesque camera recently (video) from his Fifth Avenue offices in New York.

Brooklyn-born Izzy Englander, now 61, started out in finance after graduating in the subject, in 1970, as a specialist clerk on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. He was thrown, at a young age, into the more sophisticated kind of investing arena, as his job was based on trading flows, with "very little to do with fundamentals, but much more on the transactional basis."

A couple of years later, he started a new job trading convertibles - again trading in a style closer to the "hedge mentality". He also acquired experience in merger arbitrage: "I was basically brought up in the world of non-correlated type of trading... always trying to find an edge and to make a risk-adjusted profit."

When the options market became standardised in the early 70s with the advent of the Chicago Board of Exchange, most arbitrageurs who traded convertibles started trading options as well. In the mid-70s, when the American Stock Exchange got on the options wagon, Englander got a seat on the floor of that e......................

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