Brian Winterflood, City share trader and founding father of Alternative Investment Market – obituary
Brian Winterflood, who has died aged 86, was a stock jobber who drove the democratisation of the City as the founding father of the Unlisted Securities Market, the trading arena for smaller company shares which later evolved into Aim.
Winterflood made markets – offering buying and selling prices – in a wide range of UK equities for the jobbing firm of Bisgood Bishop and later in his own firm, Winterflood Securities. His reputation, maintained over 60 years, was for straight dealing and straight talking, but with charm: a combination of “a pretty steely edge with slightly old-world courtesy” (as one peer put it, and an adherence to “my word is my bond”.
As a specialist in smaller-sized share deals, he was frustrated in the 1970s by the lack of orderly trading mechanisms for the smallest companies, whose shares changed hands outside the Exchange in the unreliable “over the counter” market.
His campaign for the creation of the Unlisted Securities Market, set up in November 1980, was so successful that he became known as “Mr USM”. High-growth entrepreneurial ventures were henceforth able to achieve public launch at lower cost and with simpler prospectuses than on the main exchange, and by 1987, shares in 500 of them were actively traded.
In 1995, the USM transitioned to the Alternative Investment Market (Aim), widely regarded as one of the major developments of City activity in modern times. As one fellow veteran observed: “Without Brian, Aim would not have thrived.”
Brian Martin Winterflood was born in East Ham on Jan 31 1937, one of three children of George Winterflood, a tram driver and café owner, and his wife Doris née Waddington. It was a deeply unhappy childhood: Brian hated his brutal alcoholic father so much that he thought of going to Somerset House “to discover if he really was my father – except I look a lot like him”.
The family moved to Uxbridge, where Brian was educated at Frays College; when his father stopped paying the fees, a sympathetic steacher helped the 16-year-old Brian find a place in the City as a messenger, and later a “blue button” (clerk), with the stockbrokers Greener Dreyfus.
After National Service in the RAF, he returned to Greener Dreyfus but decided that without connections or public-school polish, “stock-broking was not for the likes of me”. Jobbing, with the firm of Bisgood Bishop, suited him better and he joined the partnership there in 1967.
In 1986, as part of the City’s “Big Bang” ownership revolution, Bisgood Bishop was acquired by County NatWest and made part of an integrated investment banking operation which Winterflood found excessively bureaucratic.
