The 2014 Trading Technology 40: Michael Liberman

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Michael Liberman

Chief Operating Officer

BlueMountain Capital Management

Last year: 16

Although regulatory and market-structure reforms may seem daunting to those in the trenches of the fixed-income and derivatives markets, Michael Liberman sees the upside. A managing partner of New York–based BlueMountain Capital Management and head of one of the hedge fund industry’s most innovative technology shops, Liberman says the proliferation of instruments that are trading transparently creates opportunities for strategies that weren’t available in the past. “These changes will enable more technology-driven, real-time, systematic surveillance and execution on all types of price distortions, especially across different markets and asset classes,” explains the 49-year-old COO and chief risk officer, whom BlueMountain founders Andrew Feldstein and Stephen Siderow recruited from Goldman Sachs Group in 2004. That could mean “arbitraging between single-name credit default swaps and the [corresponding] index, credit versus equity trades or bonds versus CDS.” Anticipating a data analytics bonanza, Liberman doubled the size of his quantitative strategies team over the past year, to 40. He believes there should be more “open technology” in finance and is pushing that agenda. BlueMountain was an early participant in Markit Group’s federated chat network (see Chip Carver, No. 7) and has released Deedle, a library for time-series data analysis, into the open-source community. “Many open-source databases outrun what you can get from a commercial provider,” asserts Liberman. “We are on the cusp of something truly disruptive. [Open source] is going to be just as significant for finance as what we’ve seen in the consumer space.”

See also Liberman’s profiles in the 2013 Trading Technology 40 and the 2012 Trading Technology 30.