< The 2015 Trading Technology 40: Going with the Flow
12
Gerald O’Connell
Chief Information Officer
CBOE Holdings
Last year: 12
It takes a steady hand to keep the engines running for exchanges that thrive on volatility. For the Chicago Board Options Exchange and other venues under the CBOE Holdings umbrella, Gerald O’Connell has been just that for a generation (the human, not the computer, kind). Defying survey data that places the average job tenure of chief information officers somewhere between four and six years, O’Connell has been executive vice president and CIO of the leading U.S. options exchange operator since 1993. It’s been more than 30 years, all told, since the John Marshall Law School graduate brought his programming and management talents to CBOE from Hyatt Hotels Corp. “I’ve seen a lot of changes in the industry over that time period,” the 63-year-old reflects. These days CBOE is “very much involved in competition for order flow.” Last June, playing to a growing global audience, the company extended trading hours for futures on its popular Volatility Index (VIX) to 23 hours and 45 minutes a day, five days a week. Plans are to bring S&P 500 index options and VIX options to round-the-clock trading this year, and other proprietary products may follow. “What’s driving that is demand from Europe and Asia,” O’Connell says. “We want that volume, and we are making trading available to those participants in their time zones.”
See also O’Connell’s profiles in the 2013 Trading Technology 40, the 2012 Trading Technology 30 and the 2012 Tech 50.
The 2015 Trading Technology 40
| 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 |
| Kevin Kometer CME Group | Richard Prager BlackRock | Raymond Tierney III Bloomberg Tradebook | Jonathan Ross KCG Holdings | Charles Vice Intercontinental Exchange |
| 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 |
| Chris Isaacson BATS Global Markets | Bradley Peterson Nasdaq OMX Group | Brad Levy MarkitSERV | Dan Keegan Citi | Ronald DePoalo Fidelity Institutional |
| 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 |
| Gerard Beatty Goldman Sachs Group | Gerald O’Connell CBOE Holdings | Brenda Hoffman TMX Group | Billy Hult Tradeweb Markets | Nicholas Themelis MarketAxess Holdings |
| 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 |
| Bina Kalola Bank of America Merrill Lynch | Gil Mandelzis EBS-BrokerTec (ICAP) | Steven Randich Financial Industry Regulatory Authority | Jerry Dobner GFI Group | Michael Liberman BlueMountain Capital Management |
| 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 |
| Bill Chow and Richard Leung Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing | Jamie Selway Investment Technology Group | Brad Katsuyama IEX Group | John Mackay (Mack) Gill MillenniumIT | Jamil Nazarali Citadel Execution Services |
| 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 |
| Robert Cornish International Securities Exchange | Tyler Moeller andJoshua Walksy Broadway Technology | Rishi Nangalia REDI Holdings | Manoj Narang Tradeworx, Thesys Technologies | Oki Matsumoto Monex Group |
| 31 | 32 | 33 | 34 | 35 |
| Alasdair Haynes Aquis Exchange | Veronica Augustsson Cinnober Financial Technology | Stu Taylor Algomi | Luís Otávio Saliba Furtado BM&FBovespa | Tal Cohen Chi-X Global Holdings |
| 36 | 37 | 38 | 39 | 40 |
| Donal Byrne Corvil | R. Cromwell Coulson OTC Markets Group | Alfred Eskandar Portware | Richard Korhammer SR Labs | Hazem Dawani OptionsCity Software |
