< The 2016 Trading Technology 40

Michael Lewis’s 2014 best seller Flash Boys brought mass-market attention to IEX Group and the alternative trading system that it launched the year before. Today a much more technical document — an application to the Securities and Exchange Commission to become a full-fledged exchange — puts IEX in a different kind of spotlight. The objective of gaining exchange status is not to further fragment equity trading, “which would not be good for customers,” says Rob Park, chief technology officer of New York–based IEX. “There has to be a reason why IEX as an exchange should exist: to create fair markets.” Indeed, fairness and transparency are the mantras of buy-side-owned IEX. The firm was founded by a team from RBC Capital Markets, where Park was head of global algorithmic trading and IEX CEO Brad Katsuyama (No. 23 last year) was global head of electronic sales and trading. IEX’s defining technological element is a 38-mile-long coil of fiber-optic cable called the POP (short for “point of presence”) that slows orders by 350 microseconds. The “speed bump” is an antidote to latency arbitrage, or trading strategies that capitalize on delays in exchanges’ updates of price quotes, which Park sees as “an invisible tax on the investment process.” Noting that IEX has been criticized for its smart order router, which sends trade notifications to buyers and sellers through the speed bump, Park, 37, says, “The heated debate around this confirmed for us that 350 microseconds really do matter.” Anticipating that it will be operating an open exchange, Park’s team over the past year has created a lit order book and a proprietary data feed; it 2014 it launched a new order type, dubbed discretionary peg, that puts requested trades on hold when IEX predicts favorable price changes are about to occur. “Achieving exchange status would place us at the table, where we can become a voice for those that have been victimized in the current marketplace,” Park says.

 
2016 Trading Technology 40

1. Raymond Tierney III Bloomberg 2. Richard Prager BlackRock Methanol Gains Traction as an Alternative Energy Source Sponsored by CME Group May 5, 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