The Trading Technology 40: Back From the Edge

On the last day of 2012, within an hour of the closing bell, New York Stock Exchange traders were alerted to a technical glitch in the market’s order-matching system. The problem affected just 26 stocks and was cleared up within four minutes — but that good news was tinged with the knowledge that far worse can happen, and did.

The 2013 Trading Technology 40
Rank	Firm
1	Kevin Kometer CME Group
2	Edwin Marcial IntercontinentalExchange
3	Raymond Tierney III Bloomberg Tradebook
4	Brian Conroy Fidelity Capital Markets
5	Jonathan Ross Getco
6	Anna Ewing Nasdaq OMX Group
7	Chip Carver Markit Group
8	Gerald O'Connell Chicago Board Options Exchange
9	Richard Prager BlackRock
10	Daniel Friel International Securities Exchange
11	Peter Leukert NYSE Euronext
12	Mark Beeston ICAP
13	Gregg Berman SEC
14	Ben Sylvester J.P. Morgan Asset Management
15	托尼Weeresinghe LSE Group
16	Michael Liberman BlueMountain Capital Management
17	Chris Isaacson BATS Global Markets
18	Dan Keegan Citi
19	Jerry Dobner GFI Group
20	Adam Broun Credit Suisse
21	Mark Gorton Tower Research Capital
22	Joshua Walsky Broadway Technology
23	Billy Hult Tradeweb Markets
24	Maureen O'Hara ITG
25	Nicholas Themelis MarketAxess Holdings
26	Howard Edelstein BondDesk Group
27	Brenda Hoffman TMX Group
28	Eran Fishler 公关agma Securities
29	Saro Jahani Direct Edge
30	Oki Matsumoto Monex Group
31	Philippe Buhannic TradingScreen
32	Bill Chow and Richard Leung Hong Kong Exchanges & Clearing
33	John Bajus Jefferies Group
34	Alfred Eskandar Portware
35	Steven O'Hanlon Numerix
36	Luis Otavio Saliba Furtado BM&FBovespa
37	Steven Harrison Imagine Software
38	Harpal Sandhu Integral Development Corp.
39	Kevin Covington ITRS
40	Rob Flatley CoreOne Technologies

For those who build and manage market and trading technologies, 2012 was punctuated by trouble. High-profile system malfunctions marred the BATS Global Markets and Facebook IPOs in March and May, respectively, and brought down market maker Knight Capital Group in August. These too were good news/bad news incidents, not as catastrophic as the still-reverberating “flash crash” of May 6, 2010, but reminders that such technological snafus happen too frequently for comfort.

All of this casts a pall over the industry and profession represented by the Trading Technology 40,Institutional Investor’s第二届全球排名最著名的innovators and managers in the field. Their comments reflect soul-searching about the incessant pursuit of lightning-fast transactional capability. “Do we really need to be trading in nanoseconds?” asks Brenda Hoffman (No. 27), head technologist of Toronto’s TMX Group. Dan Keegan (No. 18), global head of cash equities at Citi, considers speed a commodity and says factors like client service and global footprint will define the winners.

Still, the trading technology leaders — selected byIIstaff based on their accomplishments and contributions at both the company and industry levels — are hardly retrenching or lacking for successes. For example, CME Group (Kevin Kometer, No. 1) and Chicago Board Options Exchange (Gerald O’Connell, No. 8) pulled off major system conversions without a hitch. IntercontinentalExchange’s information technology track record (Edwin Marcial, No. 2) helped underpin its takeover bid for NYSE Euronext (Peter Leukert, No. 11).

Last year’s rankings, shown in parentheses, are from the initial Trading Tech 30. Newcomers are denoted “PNR” (previously not ranked).

The ranking was compiled under the direction of Senior Contributing Editor Jeffrey Kutler. Individual profiles were written by Kutler; Editor Michael Peltz; Asia Bureau Chief Allen T. Cheng; Senior Writers Frances Denmark, Imogen Rose-Smith and Julie Segal; Staff Writer Neil Sen; and Associate Web Editor Ben Baris.