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The 2016 Trading Technology 40: D. Keith Ross Jr.

No. 31 D. Keith Ross Jr., Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, PDQ Enterprises

    31
    D. Keith Ross Jr.
    Chairman and Chief Executive Officer
    PDQ Enterprises
    PNR

    At the start of this century, after more than a decade as a floor trader at the Chicago Board Options Exchange and 20 years of trading for himself,D. Keith Ross Jr.decided it was time for a change. He went to work for algorithmic trading pioneer Getco, serving as CEO from 2002 to 2005. By then convinced of how thoroughly low-latency technology was transforming the business, Ross took the CEO job at alternative trading systems firm PDQ Enterprises in 2006. Technology visionary Christopher Keith, a former New York Stock Exchange CTO, had founded Glenview, Illinois–based PDQ in 2003. A liquidity-aggregation patent he obtained in 2008 is at the heart of the PDQ ATS, which launched in 2009 and, through both internally generated volume and PDQ’s routing business, is executing about 1.5 percent of all stock trades. PDQ’s contribution to trading innovation, Ross explains, is a “pause” feature that allows for a better read on the market: It halts an order for 20 milliseconds to build a “minibook” where responses to a proposed trade can be listed in a price-time ranking. “Before electronic trading you could go to the specialist post,” says Ross, 61. “He’d give some color on where the buyers and sellers were, and a broker could gather information and find out the state of the market.” Modern trading makes getting that read and color more complicated, and technology has introduced new problems, such as layering and spoofing. “If you reverse the flow, so to speak, and start with the ‘What is the market?’ question, it re-creates what I would call floor competition and puts the person who’s initiating the order back in the driver’s seat,” Ross says. PDQ’s generic offering is a 20-millisecond pause, but it also offers a five-millisecond pause and expects to roll out a 30-second pause later this year.

    2016 Trading Technology 40

    1.Raymond Tierney III
    Bloomberg
    2.Richard Prager
    BlackRock
    3.Chris Isaacson
    BATS Global Markets
    4.Jonathan Ross
    KCG Holdings
    5.Bradley Peterson
    Nasdaq
    6.Brad Levy
    Markit
    7.Dan Keegan
    Citi
    8.Ronald DePoalo
    Fidelity Institutional
    9.Raj Mahajan
    Goldman Sachs Group
    10.Ari Studnitzer
    CME Group
    11.Mayur Kapani
    Intercontinental Exchange
    12.Gerald O’Connell
    CBOE Holdings
    13.Nicholas Themelis
    MarketAxess Holdings
    14.Gil Mandelzis
    EBS BrokerTec (ICAP)
    15.Bill Chow and Richard Leung
    Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing
    16.Rob Park
    IEX Group
    17.Philip Weisberg
    Thomson Reuters
    18.John Mackay (Mack) Gill
    MillenniumIT
    19.Robert Cornish
    International Securities Exchange
    20.Paul Hamill
    Citadel Securities
    21.Eric Noll
    Convergex
    22.Tyler Moeller and Joshua Walsky
    Broadway Technology
    23.Rishi Nangalia
    REDI Holdings
    24.Veronica Augustsson
    Cinnober Financial Technology
    25.Alasdair Haynes
    Aquis Exchange
    26.Manoj Narang
    Mana Partners
    27.Gaurav Suri
    Arcesium
    28.Robert Sloan
    S3 Partners
    29.Anton Katz and Stephen Mock
    AQR Capital Mgmt
    30.Stu Taylor
    Algomi
    31.D. Keith Ross Jr.
    PDQ Enterprises
    32.Donal Byrne
    Corvil
    33.Alfred Eskandar
    Portware
    34.R. Cromwell Coulson
    OTC Markets Group
    35.Masayuki Hosaka
    Rakuten
    36.Peter Maragos and David Karat
    Dash Financial
    37.Amar Kuchinad
    Electronifie
    38.詹妮弗·纳亚尔
    SR Labs
    39.Dave Snowdon
    Metamako
    40.Dan Raju
    Tradier