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The 2015 Trading Technology 40: Manoj Narang
#29 Manoj Narang, Ex–Chief Executive Officer, Thesys Technologies

Manoj Narang raised his profile last spring in a Bloomberg Television debate with author Michael Lewis and IEX Group CEO Brad Katsuyama (No. 23), the protagonist of Lewis’s Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt, which suggests that markets are rigged because of high frequency traders like Narang. “High frequency trading has made markets far more transparent, liquid and fair than they have ever been,” says Narang, who founded Red Bank, New Jersey–based Tradeworx in 1999. “Markets are not rigged at all.” In 2014 the 45-year-old Massachusetts Institute of Technology graduate spent most of his time on Thesys Technologies, the New York–based affiliate of Tradeworx tasked with commercializing its trading solutions. Thesys’ technology — which Narang calls the fastest matching engine in deployment anywhere on the planet — powers the LeveL ATS and ConvergEx Group dark pools. Although last year Thesys lost out to Nasdaq OMX Group in its bid to run the Nasdaq Stock Market’s securities information processor price feed, the firm is one of six finalists in contention to provide the technology for the Securities and Exchange Commission’s consolidated audit trail for U.S. publicly traded equities. “A lot of our focus this past year has been around big data,” Narang says. “CAT is a very, very big data project.” Last month he stepped down as CEO of Thesys and Tradeworx; he hopes to pursue new projects to bring the benefits of advanced trading techniques to the masses.