< The 2016 Trading Technology 40

Market segmentation is a proven strategy in consumer goods and other industries — why not options trading? In 2013, 13 years after opening the first all-electronic U.S. options market, International Securities Exchange launched Gemini, followed in February 2016 by Mercury; each is designed to appeal to a different constituency while running on common technology. The brand names are meant to “conjure up the early days of the space program — also a big technology launch where teams got together and collaborated,” says Robert Cornish, the Eurex Group subsidiary’s chief technology officer. The 45-year-old is embracing the latest in lightweight, open-source advances, including Docker container software and the Linux-based CoreOS operating system. Containers house everything necessary to run an application, Cornish explains. They are therefore portable and facilitate installations and functionality with minimal coding and associated infrastructure. “We are the only exchange using this type of software to this extent,” resulting in greater agility, lower costs and shorter development times, Cornish adds. He expects to leverage these benefits further as ISE, with a 16 percent market share in equity options, looks to develop “one if not two new markets in different asset classes.” Cornish — who began at New York–based ISE in 1999 as a consultant, joined full-time after the original exchange went live and has been CTO since March 2013 — is in hiring mode, noting that “we expect everyone in technology to code,” whether they are in systems, network storage or operations. He is pondering the potential usefulness of the blockchain. “It’s a very complex technology and difficult to learn,” he says, but a distributed ledger’s “full listing of what has occurred over history” is promising.

 
2016 Trading Technology 40

1. Raymond Tierney III Bloomberg 2. Richard Prager BlackRock Podcast: Uncovering Opportunities in Direct Real Estate Sponsored by Fidelity Investments June 30, 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