Phupinder Gill’s financial career started on Black Monday 1987, when he watched the stock market plummet and thought it was just a really busy day. He’s come a long way to become chief executive of the world’s largest derivatives exchange.

On 19th October 1987 Gill, an MBA graduate of Washington State University, was earning $5 an hour as a trainee price reporter at the Chicago Board Options Exchange, according to a June 2010 article in the Business Times Singapore. As the crisis spread from Hong Kong to Europe and then to the US, and the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell more than 500 points, Gill remained oblivious. "The stock market crashed under my nose and I missed it," he told the paper.