Insights for action, for global investors

Tull therefore invited Dunn, Grossman and Luskin over to lunch at Morgan Stanley's opulent dining room to explain how they wanted to launch a series of exchange-traded index funds that tracked international stockmarkets. SPDR was hardly a roaring success, but Luskin seemed particularly keen on the idea. Luskin, a college dropout turned options trader, was unusually abrasive for BGI, a company that was dominated mostly by clean-cut soft-spoken former academics like Grossman, who would debate and analyze everything to death. But even Luskin's detractors admit that he was brilliant, that he brought a lot of drive and trading expertise to the organization, and that his bluntness could be useful at a place in love with never-ending Socratic debate. Luskin handed the practical task of building to suite of ETFs to Amy Schioldager, a fund manager responsible for BGI's international index funds. "Make it happen," he tersely instructed her, with little instruction on how to do it.