By Nina Mehta

By day, Brad Jordan is your average futures working stiff, taking the PATH train to and from the World Trade Center. But six evenings a month, he climbs 12 steps into a Georgian brick municipal building and becomes Brad Jordan, city councilman of Glen Rock, New Jersey.

President of New York-based Epic Trading, a commodity trading adviser that specializes in index futures, Jordan caught the political bug in the early 1990s when he helped rezone an industrial property to beef up the town's revenue base. He ran for councilman in 1995, in part because he admired the grit and style of the town's mayor. Jordan's mother, it turns out, had the same sort of grit, once serving as mayor of Leawood, Kansas, where Jordan grew up. (His mother now follows Glen Rock's council meetings on web TV and calls to chide him for wanton comments.) Once Jordan entered Glen Rock's inner circle, his fellow councilmen took one look at his business skills and made him chairman of the town's Division of Revenue and Finance, which oversees an $11 million budget. "It's funny,” he reflects now. "You treat money very differently as a councilman than you do as a trader.”

Last month's meeting, for example, entailed a discussion about whether to spend an extra $1,000 to reimburse someone for work done over and above the contract amount that had been signed for. Did Jordan feel like whipping out his own checkbook and simply writing a check? "I was outvoted 4–1,” he grimaces. "Everyone else wanted to write the check. I was the one who said we should give the contractor a little extra, but not the full billed amount, because he knew coming into it that it was going to be a loss leader.”

Jordan's background in finance has nonetheless come in handy. "It gives me some perspective on how we allocate town monies—how we deal with the inflationary aspects of materials we have to buy for the town and things like that,” he concedes. He's also helped fine-tune the placement of Glen Rock's borrowing needs. "I'll take a look at the yield curve, which is something most municipal officials have no idea about—and say, for instance, that now's a good time to extend our borrowing or shorten our borrowing,” he adds.

Moving up

Jordan got into the futures business 24 years ago as an analyst for Merrill Lynch. He was Merrill's lead floor broker in the heyday of the early 1980s, and became the first broker to execute a stock-index trade on the fledgling New York Futures Exchange when it opened its doors in 1981. After trading his own account as a local for 13 years, he made the move upstairs in 1998 because he sees floor trading as a young man's game (some traders wear support hose to keep from getting varicose veins, he points out) and because he expects the markets to go electronic in a couple years.

Jordan's life as a CTA hasn't been all fun and roses, though. Part of the job involves supervising allocations and expending energy on nontrading decisions—all of which can quickly morph into a chore. So Jordan, whose money under management has fluctuated between $500,000 and $9 million, last year pared down his accounts to those that match his trading style as a short-term market-timer. Soon, he says, he'll expand into relative-strength and outright sector trades in international indices. And by the end of the year, he hopes to launch a hedge fund and work up to about $25 million. Bucking the trend, however, he expects to deal almost exclusively in regulated contracts. Peering even deeper into virgin territory, he says he plans to disclose the fund's value every day, as mutual funds do.

So is he a trader with a yen for politics or a politico underwriting a stipend-less gig? Fundamentally, he's a trader. "But it's yin and yang,” he says, "the public persona vs. the private trader. Politics keeps me balanced as a trader. It satisfies a certain need in me, which is part benevolent, to give back to the community—and I enjoy feeling like I'm getting something done.”

• Keith Bailey, managing director at Merrill Lynch Capital Services in New York, has been elected chairman of the International Swaps and Derivatives Association.
• Merrill Lynch has promoted Arshad Zakaria, former managing director and head of the global corporate finance group in investment banking, to senior vice president and head of corporate risk management. The company also named T.J. Lim, previously co-head of global markets at Dresdner Kleinwort Benson, head of international debt markets.
• Heidy Jameel, former COO at United Capital Securities in Sydney, has been promoted to CEO.
• Warburg Dillon Read has named Ian Hardington, former head of leveraged finance origination at SG Cowen in New York, managing director and co-head of European leveraged finance in London. Michael Grayer, former head of leveraged and acquisition lending at WDR, was named co-head of the European leveraged finance group in January.
• Rafaelle Mincione has been appointed to head a new bank derivatives unit at Salomon Smith Barney. He had been a managing director for Latin American derivatives sales at Merrill Lynch.
• Credit Suisse First Boston has named Douglas Paul, a former member of the U.S. fixed-income sales group, chairman of fixed income and derivatives.
• Edward Joyce has been named president and COO of the Chicago Board Options Exchange. He had been executive vice president in charge of business development. Charles Henry, the outgoing president and COO of the CBOE since 1979, has retired.
• Wells Fargo Educational Financial Services has announced that Greg Jaeger will join the company as senior vice president and director of risk management. He had been vice president and business manager of dealer financial services at U.S. Bancorp.
• Jean de Fonenay, the founder and president of Summit Systems, has resigned. Herve Baulme, founder and former president of Quotient France, which is part of the Summit Group, has been elected CEO of Summit.
• The Philadelphia Stock Exchange has announced some changes in its board of governors. Kevin Foley, chief executive of Bloomberg Tradebook, and Christopher Nagy, trading manager of Advanced Clearing, have been elected off-floor governors. R. James Woolsey, a partner at law firm Shea & Gardner, has been appointed a public governor. Kevin Kennedy, head specialist for Oppenheimer Noonan Weiss, was re-elected as an on-floor options specialist governor. And Thomas Wynn, president of Wynncroft, has been re-elected as an on-floor equity governor.
• Brian Cook, former COO at Deutsche Bank, has been named COO at London Clearing House.
• Wall Street Systems has named John Meehan head of its fixed-income unit. He was previously managing director and head of fixed income at Deutsche Bank. The firm also named Jim Pfeiffer corporate communications manager. He previously arranged training workshops at Compaq Computer Corp.
• Satish Nandapurker, former head of strategic solutions at OptiMark, has been named managing director of e-business at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange.
• The merged Royal Bank of Scotland and NatWest has named Brian Crowe, former head of treasury at RBS, group treasurer.
• Leigh Baxandall, former director for global derivatives and quantitative research at Nomura Securities International, has been appointed director of European equity derivatives strategy at Deutsche Bank.
• FAME Information Services has appointed Bill Wilson executive vice president. He had been president of Unocal Global Trade.
• Ron Tanemura, former head of credit derivatives at Deutsche Bank, has joined Goldman Sachs as global head of credit derivatives. Pablo Calderini, former managing director and global head of emerging markets at Deutsche Bank, will take over Tanemura's previous position.
• Hans Kim, former head of treasury marketing at Banque Nationale de Paris in Seoul, has joined Credit Lyonnais as head of interest rate derivatives sales. Banque Nationale de Paris has hired Eugene Hong, a foreign exchange salesperson at ABN Amro, to take over some of Kim's responsibilities.
• Barclays in London has named Tim Shepheard-Walwyn group risk director. He had been a managing director in the corporate risk control department at UBS.
• Greg Drennen, a former mortgage trader at Goldman Sachs, has been appointed vice president of mortgage trading at Clinton Group, a New York-based hedge fund.