< The 2016 Trading Technology 40

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 Building Resilient Portfolios: Infrastructure’s Strategic Advantage Sponsored by IFM Investors May 9, 2025 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. Jennifer Nayar SR Labs 39. Dave Snowdon Metamako 40. Dan Raju Tradier