I’m excited.
The first time I got to interview Tom O’Malley, he had just been appointed head of Phibro, which at that time traded everything and never fired anybody. It was 1983, the most recent commodity super cycle had come to a screeching halt, and he had to make changes; the idea that all you needed to do was go long and cash in the profits a few months later was now a sure-fire loser.
So the company that traded everything stopped doing so, and the company that never fired anybody shocked the world by doing a lot of that. As a reporter at American Metal Market, I got one of the first interviews with O’Malley, one hot summer morning.