< The 2015 Trading Technology 40: Going with the Flow

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.

 
The 2015 Trading Technology 40

1	2	3	4	5
Kevin Kometer CME Group	Richard Prager BlackRock	Raymond Tierney III Bloomberg Tradebook	Jonathan Ross KCG Holdings	Charles Vice Intercontinental Exchange
6	7 Zef Nikolla	8	9	10
Chris Isaacson BATS Global Markets	Bradley Peterson Nasdaq OMX Group	Brad Levy MarkitSERV	Dan Keegan Citi	Ronald DePoalo Fidelity Institutional
11 Mark McQueen	12	13	14	15 Margaret Fox
Gerard Beatty Goldman Sachs Group	Gerald O'Connell CBOE Holdings	Brenda Hoffman TMX Group	Billy Hult Tradeweb Markets	Nicholas Themelis MarketAxess Holdings
16	17	18 Martin H. Simon	19 Todd Plitt	20 A.E. Fletcher Photography
Bina Kalola Bank of America Merrill Lynch	Gil Mandelzis EBS-BrokerTec (ICAP)	Steven Randich Financial Industry Regulatory Authority	Jerry Dobner GFI Group	Michael Liberman BlueMountain Capital Management
21	22 Photographer:http://www.digitalh	23	24 Dennis Degnan	25 Paul Elledge
Bill Chow and Richard Leung Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing	Jamie Selway Investment Technology Group	Brad Katsuyama IEX Group	John Mackay (Mack) Gill MillenniumIT	Jamil Nazarali Citadel Execution Services
26	27	28 Picasa	29 Andrew Harrer	30 Takashi KATO
Robert Cornish International Securities Exchange	Tyler Moeller andJoshua Walksy Broadway Technology	Rishi Nangalia REDI Holdings	Manoj Narang Tradeworx, Thesys Technologies	Oki Matsumoto Monex Group
31	32 unknown	33 Douglas Kurn	34 Luludi/LUZ	35 William Neumann Photography
Alasdair Haynes Aquis Exchange	Veronica Augustsson Cinnober Financial Technology	Stu Taylor Algomi	Luís Otávio Saliba Furtado BM&FBovespa	Tal Cohen Chi-X Global Holdings
36	37	38	39	40
Donal Byrne Corvil	R. Cromwell Coulson OTC Markets Group	Alfred Eskandar Portware	Richard Korhammer SR Labs	Hazem Dawani OptionsCity Software