< The 2016 Trading Technology 40
31
D. Keith Ross Jr.
Chairman and Chief Executive Officer
PDQ Enterprises
PNR
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 2. Richard Prager 3. Chris Isaacson 4. Jonathan Ross 5. Bradley Peterson |
6. Brad Levy 7. Dan Keegan 8. Ronald DePoalo 9. Raj Mahajan 10. Ari Studnitzer |
11. Mayur Kapani 12. Gerald O’Connell 13. Nicholas Themelis 14. Gil Mandelzis 15. Bill Chow and Richard Leung |
16. Rob Park 17. Philip Weisberg 18. John Mackay (Mack) Gill 19. Robert Cornish 20. Paul Hamill |
21. Eric Noll 22. Tyler Moeller and Joshua Walsky 23. Rishi Nangalia 24. Veronica Augustsson 25. Alasdair Haynes |
26. Manoj Narang 27. Gaurav Suri 28. Robert Sloan 29. Anton Katz and Stephen Mock 30. Stu Taylor |
31. D. Keith Ross Jr. 32. Donal Byrne 33. Alfred Eskandar 34. R. Cromwell Coulson 35. Masayuki Hosaka |
36. Peter Maragos and David Karat 37. Amar Kuchinad 38. Jennifer Nayar 39. Dave Snowdon 40. Dan Raju |
|