< The 2015 Trading Technology 40: Going with the Flow

Fixed-income markets need “a change in mind-set,” asserts BlueMountain Capital Management’s Michael Liberman. “People have to rethink how they operate,” and “new tools” are called for. Last year the $20 billion, New York–based hedge fund firm released a protocol for large corporate-credit transactions that COO Liberman believes can be part of the solution for an asset class plagued by illiquidity. “Trading a large block in credit is incredibly challenging,” explains Liberman, 50, a staunch advocate of open-source technology whom BlueMountain co-founders Andrew Feldstein and Stephen Siderow recruited from Goldman Sachs Group in 2004. Now a managing partner presiding over one of the alternative-investment sector’s most innovative technology shops, Liberman adds: “Banks have tried to create single-dealer platforms. But we believe more of an all-to-all approach is needed.” BlueMountain designed the protocol to bring together the maximum number of traders with interest in a particular security. For the firm’s internal initiatives, Liberman continues to expand his quantitative strategies team — it doubled in 2013, to 40 members, and added ten in 2014 — while regulatory concerns weigh more heavily on management. Liberman says BlueMountain is developing a system to capture a complete picture of its financing — “the cost of it, the capital commitment of it, the certainty of it, and other franchise values and relationship values that exist.”

 
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