< Wall Street's Nerds: The World's Most Powerful Trading Executives

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 Methanol Gains Traction as an Alternative Energy Source Sponsored by CME Group May 5, 2025 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