This week on The Spread, FIA hosts a virtual version of Boca, Bill Brodsky and Steven Sears start an options-focused asset management firm, and more.

The John Lothian Daily Update is a podcast turning the daily JLN hits and takes comments, our original content and the stories and quips in the top box of First Read into a daily podcast.

FIA Boca-V 2021 wrapped up with FIA CEO Walt Lukken thanking attendees and welcoming 2021’s inductees into the Futures Industry Hall of Fame.

It’s hard to argue against the merits of sustainability, but making it into investable products is a work in progress among members of the financial community.

The FIA Boca-V conference saw a slight deviation in form with its final keynote speaker on the topic of sustainability. Instead of an extended Q&A or a roundtable discussion among many panelists seen in sessions from previous days, FIA CEO Walt Lukken gave the floor to renowned astrophysicist and former space science education lead at NASA, Dr. Hakeem Oluseyi, to tell his life story.

In a one-on-one discussion with FIA President Walt Lukken on Thursday, Acting CFTC Rostin Behnam talked about the commission’s new Climate Risk Unit, saying the unit will let the commission pivot its attention away from the broader concerns about the effects of climate change on financial markets raised in last year’s report from the CFTC’s Market Risk Advisory Committee to a focus on derivatives’ role in smoothing the transition to zero carbon emissions by 2050.

Rana Foroohar, global economic analyst and Financial Times columnist, gave a fascinating presentation to FIA Boca on Wednesday on surveillance capitalism that melded finance with global politics and foreign affairs as well as some history, current events and a little prognostication. While the title of the talk was surveillance capitalism, Foroohar included a discussion of the death of neoliberalism and U.S. and EU global policy changes.

As part of a series of presentations at FIA Boca on Wednesday, exchange leaders weighed in on fintech. Kicking off the discussion, Terry Duffy, chairman and chief executive officer of CME Group, noted that the cost of technology at the exchanges is substantial and much more expensive than open outcry.

A practically ebullient panel provided enormously incisive and positive remarks during the “Technology – Changing How Markets Operate” panel at FIA Boca-V on Wednesday.

Financial institutions are great at collecting data, but they actually utilize less than 1 percent of what they have in-house, said Google executive Derek White. That’s a strong use case for enlisting cloud technology’s help clean and connect that data to the players in a market’s ecosystem.

The second day of FIA Boca-V was reserved mainly for discussions focused on one of the most disruptive pieces of financial technology shaking up the markets today. I’m not talking about smartphone apps that let you make options bets based on nihilistic posts you read on Reddit – I’m talking about cryptocurrency.

Eurex CEO Michael Peters on Wednesday told this year’s FIA Boca-V attendees that Eurex will launch a futures contract on a bitcoin ETN, an instrument that trades on Deutsche Boerse’s Xetra platform. Peters nodded to the example of other Eurex derivatives based on ETNs, mentioning specifically its gold ETN futures, but offering no launch date or other details on the bitcoin product.

Walt Lukken kicked off the FIA Boca-V conference, not from a stage in Boca Raton, Florida, but from his office in Washington, D.C. He was dressed in a dark jacket and pink tie. Normally, we are surrounded by pink at the 95-year-old Boca Resort. His opening remarks were titled “The Boca That Is,” after the Boca that wasn’t last year. The good news is that Walt has moved out of his basement office.

The global leaders panel of FIA Boca-V has been broken into three parts this week: trends, access and regulatory issues and geopolitics. The access and regulatory issues discussed on Tuesday focused on growth opportunities and questions about retail traders using social media sites like Reddit to compete against institutions.

“Global Exchange Leaders on Markets: Trends” was a session during FIA Boca-V that was stacked with top-level executives from some of the biggest exchanges in the industry. Appropriately, it was one of the first sessions that took place on Day One of the virtual conference — it’s always good to start these things off with a bang.

If there still are any doubters as to the extent of Brexit’s impact on London’s financial markets, Mairead McGuinness, European commissioner for financial services, set them straight on Tuesday. In a keynote address to the FIA’s Boca conference, she called the U.K.’s then-popular 2016 decision to leave the E.U. “a major fragmenting event” with consequences.

After the now-inevitable discussions of the financial industry’s successful taming of the threats presented by first the pandemic and then Brexit, the hour-long session ”The Future of Markets” provided a solid 25 minutes of discussion about a couple of topics likely to affect markets as time goes on: ESG and 24/7 trading.

Nasdaq IR Intelligence analyst Saleem Daya sat down to talk with JLN about a recent jump in cannabis stock price volatility. He also explained what is behind the rise in mergers and acquisitions in the space.

Jack Sandner was all the things listed in the headline above, but also many more. He might be remembered for all of them, but I will remember him as a determined defender and proponent of Chicago’s futures markets, especially the Chicago Mercantile Exchange’s.

Jack Sandner is remembered by industry friends, colleagues, and market and industry participants.