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The 2017 Trading Tech 40: Rob Park

15. Rob Park
Chief Technology Officer
IEX Group
Last year: 16

Then an upstart alternative trading system, IEX Group was portrayed as an anti-establishment disrupter in Michael Lewis's 2014 best-seller Flash Boys. Now it is a full-fledged exchange business — IEX obtained Securities and Exchange Commission approval last June for the Investors Exchange, which went live in August. It's still taking potshots from the equity market establishment as its market share hovers around 2 percent. A distinguishing feature, built into the infrastructure overseen by chief technology officer Rob Park, is a 350-microsecond speed bump designed to enforce the IEX ideal of a "fair, simple, and transparent stock exchange" protective of long-term investors' interests. In practice the bump prevents high frequency traders from taking advantage of fleeting delays in exchanges' price updates — known as latency arbitrage, which Park, 38, calls "an invisible tax on the investment process."

A member of the IEX founding team, led by CEO Brad Katsuyama, that came out of RBC Capital Markets, Park was previously co-founder of Quantera Financial Corp., a proprietary high frequency trading firm that specialized in statistical and machine learning algorithms. He and Katsuyama are board members of TradeWind Markets, an IEX technology spin-off that raised $9 million in funding last year to develop a blockchain-based gold marketplace.


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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