< The 2015 Trading Technology 40: Going with the Flow

It takes a steady hand to keep the engines running for exchanges that thrive on volatility. For the Chicago Board Options Exchange and other venues under the CBOE Holdings umbrella, Gerald O’Connell has been just that for a generation (the human, not the computer, kind). Defying survey data that places the average job tenure of chief information officers somewhere between four and six years, O’Connell has been executive vice president and CIO of the leading U.S. options exchange operator since 1993. It’s been more than 30 years, all told, since the John Marshall Law School graduate brought his programming and management talents to CBOE from Hyatt Hotels Corp. “I’ve seen a lot of changes in the industry over that time period,” the 63-year-old reflects. These days CBOE is “very much involved in competition for order flow.” Last June, playing to a growing global audience, the company extended trading hours for futures on its popular Volatility Index (VIX) to 23 hours and 45 minutes a day, five days a week. Plans are to bring S&P 500 index options and VIX options to round-the-clock trading this year, and other proprietary products may follow. “What’s driving that is demand from Europe and Asia,” O’Connell says. “We want that volume, and we are making trading available to those participants in their time zones.”

See also O'Connell's profiles in the 2013 Trading Technology 40, the 2012 Trading Technology 30 and the 2012 Tech 50.

 
The 2015 Trading Technology 40

1	2	3	4	5
Kevin Kometer CME Group	Richard Prager BlackRock	Raymond Tierney III Bloomberg Tradebook	Jonathan Ross KCG Holdings	Charles Vice Intercontinental Exchange
6	7 Zef Nikolla	8	9	10
Chris Isaacson BATS Global Markets	Bradley Peterson Nasdaq OMX Group	Brad Levy MarkitSERV	Dan Keegan Citi	Ronald DePoalo Fidelity Institutional
11 Mark McQueen	12	13	14	15 Margaret Fox
Gerard Beatty Goldman Sachs Group	Gerald O'Connell CBOE Holdings	Brenda Hoffman TMX Group	Billy Hult Tradeweb Markets	Nicholas Themelis MarketAxess Holdings
16	17	18 Martin H. Simon	19 Todd Plitt	20 A.E. Fletcher Photography
Bina Kalola Bank of America Merrill Lynch	Gil Mandelzis EBS-BrokerTec (ICAP)	Steven Randich Financial Industry Regulatory Authority	Jerry Dobner GFI Group	Michael Liberman BlueMountain Capital Management
21	22 Photographer:http://www.digitalh	23	24 Dennis Degnan	25 Paul Elledge
Bill Chow and Richard Leung Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing	Jamie Selway Investment Technology Group	Brad Katsuyama IEX Group	John Mackay (Mack) Gill MillenniumIT	Jamil Nazarali Citadel Execution Services
26	27	28 Picasa	29 Andrew Harrer	30 Takashi KATO
Robert Cornish International Securities Exchange	Tyler Moeller andJoshua Walksy Broadway Technology	Rishi Nangalia REDI Holdings	Manoj Narang Tradeworx, Thesys Technologies	Oki Matsumoto Monex Group
31	32 unknown	33 Douglas Kurn	34 Luludi/LUZ	35 William Neumann Photography
Alasdair Haynes Aquis Exchange	Veronica Augustsson Cinnober Financial Technology	Stu Taylor Algomi	Luís Otávio Saliba Furtado BM&FBovespa	Tal Cohen Chi-X Global Holdings
36	37	38	39	40
Donal Byrne Corvil	R. Cromwell Coulson OTC Markets Group	Alfred Eskandar Portware	Richard Korhammer SR Labs	Hazem Dawani OptionsCity Software