Is Chicago’s Don Wilson the smartest man in trading?

As Lehman Brothers hurtled towards bankruptcy in September 2008, the executives at the world’s largest derivatives exchange found themselves in a race against time: find a new home for the failed bank’s trading book or face more cascading chaos. In an early harbinger of a new era for markets, the winner of the bidding war for Lehman’s bets on currencies, agricultural commodities and interest rates was not one of Wall Street’s big banks, but a secretive Chicago trading firm called DRW whose founder exuded a quiet but unshakeable confidence. “Call me any time, any day or night, I will give you a price on whatever portfolio you want,” Don Wilson told a senior CME executive multiple times ahead of the crisis. Wilson’s willingness to take on positions worth hundreds of millions of dollars as crisis-ridden markets gyrated would come to embody the ascent of a breed of younger, privately held trading firms which first challenged Wall Street’s bulge bracket — and then surpassed it. As banks hav

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• Aishwarya Mahesh