< Wall Street's Nerds: The World's Most Powerful Trading Executives
18. Paul Hamill
Global Head of Fixed Income, Currencies, and Commodities
Citadel Securities
Last year: 20
Since moving from UBS to Citadel Securities in January 2015, Paul Hamill has been building and developing a fixed-income and foreign exchange trading and execution business, and it is a growth story. The market-making business, which is separate from Citadel's multistrategy hedge fund business, expanded into interest rate swaps in November 2014. "We started with just a handful of clients and are now up to well over 500 institutional counterparties," Hamill, 41, enthuses. This February it launched its off-the-run Treasuries offering — effectively an extension of the firm's business in on-the-run Treasuries. "It's exciting," he says of the new offering. "A huge focus of the last year has been getting ready for that."
Hamill calls technology the "lifeblood" of the business. "What we are about is precision, pricing, and risk," he notes. "That is what we are known for and that is what clients expect from us. We are among the best at thinking the right way about how to process data, how to look across correlations in markets, and how to think about synthesizing that in such an optimal way that you always know where the price is." Citadel is thus able to offer guaranteed market prices, giving it an edge over competitors with only indicative prices. "We make sure the price the client can see all the time is firm, it's live, it's here, we will deal right now," Hamill says.
He cites another Citadel advantage: being able to build a system from scratch, as opposed to dealing with legacy technology. "We have had to think differently about the kinds of tools we put into the hands of our traders and salespeople," he explains. With the flexibility afforded by new technology, "we can say, 'What would you like your day-to-day tool set to look like?' and we can build that, quickly." At a time when banks have to allocate significant budget to comply with Dodd-Frank implementation firms like Citadel Securities have a competitive advantage. "We are well positioned to use technology to innovate," says Hamill, who has an MA in political science from the University of Glasgow and an MSc in finance from the University of London.
The 2017 Trading Tech 40
1.Richard Prager BlackRock 2. Chris Isaacson Bats Global Markets 3. Bradley Peterson Nasdaq 4. Brad Levy MarkitSERV 5. Dan Keegan Citi |
6. Glenn Lesko Bloomberg Tradebook 7. Bryan Durkin CME Group 8. Mayur Kapani Intercontinental Exchange 9. Mike Blum KCG Holdings 10. Raj Mahajan Goldman Sachs Group |
11. Ronald DePoalo Fidelity Institutional 12. Nick Themelis MarketAxess Holdings 13. Jenny Knott NEX Optimisation 14. Billy Hult Tradeweb Markets 15. Rob Park IEX Group |
16. Bill Chow & Richard Leung Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing 17. John Mackay (Mack) Gill MillenniumIT 18. Paul Hamill Citadel Securities 19. Eric Noll Convergex 20. Veronica Augustsson Cinnober Financial Technology |
21. Tyler Moeller & Joshua Walsky Broadway Technology 22. Alasdair Haynes Aquis Exchange 23. Gaurav Suri Arcesium 24. Manoj Narang Mana Partners 25. Michael Chin & Neill Penney Thomson Reuters |
26. Robert Sloan S3 Partners 27. Anton Katz & Stephen Mock AQR Capital Management 28. Donal Byrne Corvil 29. Stu Taylor Algomi 30. Alfred Eskandar Portware |
31. Steven Randich Financial Industry Regulatory Authority 32. R. Cromwell Coulson OTC Markets Group 33. Peter Maragos Dash Financial 34. John Fawcett Quantopian 35. Donald Ross III PDQ Enterprises |
36. Jennifer Nayar Vela Trading Technologies 37. Dan Raju Tradier 38. Susan Estes OpenDoor Trading 39. David Mercer LMAX Exchange 40. Oki Matsumoto Monex Group |
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