Tjerk Westerterp passed away

At the age of 92, Tjerk Westerterp, the first director (1978-1992) and outstanding pioneer of the Amsterdam Options Exchange founded in 1978, passed away today. The Amsterdam Exchange owes a lot to this former politician who, after a 15-year career in The Hague, was responsible for something completely new: the marketing of options. While working as Minister of Transport, Public Works and Water Management, he was able to introduce mandatory helmet use and mandatory seat belts against stiff opposition; however, the introduction of options required more time. No one in the Netherlands knew anything about options, and it took five years before the general public gradually embraced the new product and thus the new exchange.

To achieve this, he and his team went around the country to deliver the options gospel. It seems there is not a Van der Valk hotel in which a lecture on the subject was not delivered. And almost every week in those early years, he was also a guest in the Stan Huygens Journaal, the much-read society section in De Telegraaf. Later – when options became more and more successful – he increased brand awareness of the options exchange even further through sports sponsorship. The name of the new exchange could not only be found on the shirts of the Roda JC football club, but the options exchange was also active as a sponsor for tennis and equestrian sports. He even hired Johan Cruijff to promote the options exchange at one point.

At the helm of the new exchange, Westerterp is known for his ‘spaghetti strategy’: simply throw a plate of spaghetti against the wall and see what sticks. And not everything sticks, of course. Unfortunately, the initial plan to turn the options exchange into a European exchange did not succeed. The time was not yet ripe in the late 1970s for such a cross-border initiative. What does stick out is his idea for a benchmark to trade index options on. He came up with this idea on the back of a cigar box during a train journey from Luxembourg to Liège in the early 1980s. His indicator later developed into the national barometer of the Dutch economy, and we all know it today as the AEX index. This is undoubtedly the best-known example of Tjerk Westerterp’s legacy for the Amsterdam Exchange, and therefore his lasting influence on the financial landscape of the Netherlands.