New futures fields

Press, 30 December 1982, Page 5

New futures fields

If the price of a product is stable over a long period there is no need for a futures market, but new fields are continually rising. The most recent are in financial areas such as currencies and debt instruments.

The problems of the futures markets in America, says Mr Darling are:

• The “bucket shops.” These are furtive traders who spring up and milk the public by promising rapid profits. • That the big companies largely are not geared up to looking at their assets and liabilities for “futures insurance" in the same way as they look at their assets and liabilities in regard to property insurance.

Most of his work is with clients who are commercial hedgers. His initial university degree in electrical engineering (before he graduated as a

master of business administration) has come in useful here.

As a consultant on information, he is closely associated with the design of computer systems for client firms. These link into various data banks to obtain information for analysis. In his own office he has two personal computers, which he uses both for drawing on data banks and word processing. He can call up on his screen information from the Dow-Jones data banks, and read through abstracts of articles in the “Wall Street Journal,” and then call up complete stories, and read them on a screen or print them out.

Word-processing software allows him to generate reports on his personal computers, and to send discs

along to the firm’s wordprocessing shop, which prints them out on letterheads and

returns them to his office. “Soon we will be able to eliminate the disc link, sending them by telephone line to the word-processing centre,” he says. Mr Darling has been a consultant in a number of countries. Perhaps the most risky was in Iran, when he arrived at the beginning of the street fighting that marked the revolution. His task was to redesign financial systems for Iran’s national oil company. He and his wife left southern Iran on an evacuation flight two weeks before the Shah. After his present holiday with his brother, Mr Stan

Darling, the journalist, he is off to Sydney and Hong Kong for a brief consultancy task before returning to Chicago.