Cantor has a large piece of digital-era trading, too, by dint of controlling publicly traded eSpeed.
"People looked at it as eSpeed's vain attempt to stop their momentum, " says a veteran trader.
They ads, which feature nine surviving Cantor employees, do not mention the firm's eSpeed electronic bond-trading software.
ESpeed by itself is the second-largest broker of Treasury bond trades (after BrokerTec).
Last summer Trading Technologies sued ESpeed, a unit of Cantor Fitzgerald, for infringement.
By September 2003 BrokerTec had 30% of the market for on-the-run (recently issued) Treasurys, eSpeed's bread-and-butter business--and Lutnick was forced to take notice.
ESpeed's share price fell after Sept. 11, 2001, of course, but when compared with just one day earlier, its shares are up 62%.
"If you were to view these, you would have no clue what eSpeed is or why I should buy it, " Professor Duffy says.
In June 2004 Lutnick hired the Bond Market Association's general counsel, Paul Saltzman, as chief operating officer, giving eSpeed a more reasonable public face.
Cantor Sport employs the same eSpeed (nasdaq: ESPD - news - people ) trading platform used by its parent, New York-based Cantor Fitzgerald, to trade in the wholesale financial markets.
Since that time, the company has struggled to rebuild and has done so with remarkable success, at least at its publicly traded subsidiary, eSpeed (nasdaq: ESPD - news - people ), which will announce earnings this week.
But instead of dropping price improvement or addressing customer problems, Lutnick slapped BrokerTec with a suit, claiming it had violated eSpeed's patents on such bond-trading conventions as the "work-up" (a practice that gave a trader, buying or selling at a given price, the right to execute all trading at that price until he's done) and "trading time" (the grace period a trader has to act under a work-up).
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