The 2017 Trading Tech 40: Glenn Lesko

Before taking the helm of Bloomberg Tradebook in 2015, Glenn Lesko held senior positions at another leading agency brokerage, Instinet, where he started as CEO of Instinet Asia in 2006 and later became head of Americas equities. The 48-year-old says that what sets Tradebook apart from its competitors is, well, Bloomberg and its formidable data and technology assets. Part of the strategic advantage for Tradebook, which handles equity, options, and futures trading on more than 125 liquidity venues for a wide range of institutional clients, is "finding ways to maximize our unique strengths as an organization," Lesko says. These include "data and analytics capabilities like no one else has," along with extensive market and network connectivity and the "agency ethos" of acting independently and in clients' best interests. (Raymond Tierney III, No. 1 last year, was formerly CEO of Bloomberg Tradebook and is currently global head of Bloomberg's broker-dealer and sell-side trading solutions business.)

Lesko points to such examples of Tradebook innovations as Strategy Analyzer, or STAZ, a pretrade tool that has been enhanced with "in-trade" analytics to adjust to market conditions as they occur and choose algorithms accordingly; an agency request-for-quote platform for anonymous block trading of exchange-traded funds; the PAIR algorithm for statistical arbitrage and price improvement; and, announced on March 6, the analytics-driven OPTX best-execution approach that responds dynamically to real-time data and changing market conditions. "Bloomberg Tradebook has more than 20 years of best-execution experience," Lesko says. "We are thinking about how to continue to accomplish that over the next 20 years."