Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer
Pragma Securities
[PNR]

David Mechner and Lee Maclin founded Pragma Financial Systems in 2003 as a technology company, and they created the algorithmic trading platform TradeEngine. Mechner, who had been a quantitative trader at a hedge fund, and Maclin, then a professor in the math finance program at New York University’s Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, formed an alliance in 2007 with full-service brokerage Weeden & Co. to distribute TradeEngine to buy-side clients. The partnership “was an inflection point,” says CEO Mechner, 40, who had been a doctoral fellow in neural biology at NYU before being lured into finance. “It opened up the institutional segment of the market to us.” The next year, Pragma launched OnePipe, which aggregates dark pools, crossing networks and other market destinations through a single conduit. By early 2009, Maclin had returned to academia, Weeden had taken an equity stake in Pragma, and the firm had its own broker-dealer, Pragma Securities. Back to its roots as a technology provider, the New York company this spring launched Hosted Algos for systematic traders, invested in new foreign exchange venture Ogg Trading and hired Jaime Jofre from Liquidnet Holdings as chief technology officer.