The former J.P. Morgan Securities banker spent the past year as co-CEO of struggling online investment bank OffRoad Capital. Now he has become head of Blackwood Trading, a seller of institutional trading systems. Though the venture is risky, Forlines says that privately held Blackwood has a healthy cash flow: Some 25 million shares are traded daily using its systems, up from 4 million in July. “We have three to four times that volume in our pipeline,” asserts the 46-year-old Forlines. “We are on the cusp of a big run at a really big marketplace.” New York-
based Blackwood is vying with a handful of rivals - including Townsend Analytics, Tradescape, Ameritrade Holdings’ TradeCast subsidiary and Spear, Leeds & Kellogg’s Rediproducts division - to sell hedge funds, basket traders and even mutual funds on the so-called direct access technologies pioneered by day traders. Says Forlines, “It’s only a matter of time before this is mainstream; no big mutual fund will commit the vast majority of its trades to systems that are not automated.”
