The 2014 Trading Technology 40: Manoj Narang

16

Manoj Narang

Chief Executive Officer

Tradeworx

(Previously not ranked)

When Manoj Narang launched Tradeworx in February 1999, he envisioned bringing to the masses the same advanced quantitative finance techniques he had learned in a series of technology and trading jobs on Wall Street. But when the dot-com bubble burst the following year, funding dried up, and Narang had to reinvent his Red Bank, New Jersey–based company. “Our business model became: Build quantitative models and trade them rather than build quantitative models and use them to design tools for other people,” says the CEO, 44, who was born in India, grew up in Edison, New Jersey, and earned a BS in math and computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 2003, Tradeworx introduced a successful market-neutral quantitative equity hedge fund. Despite the fund’s double-digit annual gains, investors fled after Lehman Brothers Holdings’ collapse in September 2008, and Narang was forced to reinvent his company again. This time a proprietary trading firm, Tradeworx introduced computer-driven high frequency strategies that could make sizable returns on just a few million dollars in capital. In 2008, Narang started Thesys Technologies to commercialize the underlying technology. More than 300 million shares a day now go through the Thesys platform. Clients include other high frequency trading firms, banks, broker-dealers, exchanges, hedge funds and regulators. “Rather than hoard our technology, we seek to commercialize it as widely as possible, even if that results in a decline in trading revenue for us,” Narang says. “So far it hasn’t.”