< Wall Street's Nerds: The World's Most Powerful Trading Executives
33. Peter Maragos
Chief Executive Officer
Dash Financial Technologies
Last year: 36
Liquidity and best execution don't come easy in options trading, not least because there are 14 U.S. equity options exchanges to navigate. As of early this year, Dash Financial, introduced in 2011 by CEO Peter Maragos and co-founder and chief marketing officer David Karat, was handling about 6.5 percent of daily options volume — a measure of the technology-focused brokerage's success in attracting institutional traders to its neutral, transparent, agency-execution model.
The power of Dash's technology became visible, literally, in January 2016 when the New York–based firm launched Dash360, a colorful dashboard incorporating the latest data visualization techniques and "empowering the buy side to discern how their orders behave in real time," Maragos said at the time. Dash followed that up in June with Drop360, enhancing its "transparency suite" for analysis and insight into order-routing and execution behavior, costs, and performance. The platform isn't confined to options: "Equities is a big growth area for us; we bring the same philosophy to it," says Maragos, 40, who before starting Dash was CEO of trading systems developer SDS Financial Technologies.
On January 4, Dash announced that it is merging with LiquidPoint, the options trading and technology business of Convergex, to create the biggest agency brokerage in options execution, with a 13 percent market share. The deal was engineered by private equity firm GTCR, which owned a controlling interest in Convergex. With the closing of the transaction on March 1, GTCR has a majority stake in the renamed Dash Financial Technologies, with Maragos serving as CEO and LiquidPoint's Ben Londergan as president. Maragos notes that there is little overlap, and considerable potential for synergy, in combining Dash with LiquidPoint. The latter has more sell-side penetration, an exchange technology business, and a compliance offering that Maragos believes will be an interesting "regtech" play by allowing firms to quickly calculate regulatory capital requirements. "Together we are uniquely positioned to offer the widest range of solutions to help the buy side, sell side, and exchanges navigate the ever-evolving market structure and regulatory environment," Maragos says.
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 |
|