Iowa Day

(There is a reference to Iowa in this somewhat long post.)

For about 14 months in and around 1997, I covered commodities trading, specifically the futures and options trading of "Softs" (coffee, sugar, cocoa, cotton, orange juice, and occasionally whole milk) from the New York City bureau of a wire service called "Futures World News," also known as "FWN." We broadcast more than one thousand stories every day via satellite to traders in 93 countries from our bureaus around the world.

I covered those five main markets in real time, writing 13 to 16 stories every day, plus one weekly feature story. I covered two exchanges in New York City and one exchange in London. Our bureau was directly across the street from the World Trade Centers, so I would occasionally visit with the traders on the trading floor (on the second floor) before the day's trading began. I also covered weekly money-supply meetings at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

(I cross-trained for a couple of weeks on "Energies," specifically crude oil, natural gas, etc. Unfortunately, I never got to train on "Forex" ("Foreign Exchange," meaning monetary-currency comparison), or "Metals" (gold, silver, etc.), both of which I preferred to cover because they are the more glamorous markets.)

FWN had various bureaus throughout the world, specifically New York City, Chicago, London, Frankfurt, Amsterdam, and Tokyo. All of the hundreds of stories written throughout each day from all of these bureaus were sent to copy editors in our main office in Waterloo, Iowa, where they were edited and then were broadcast via satellite to traders all over the world.

(We also published the monthly magazine titled "Futures," but I was not involved with that.)