< The 2015 Trading Technology 40: Going with the Flow
20
Michael Liberman
Chief Operating Officer
BlueMountain Capital Management
Last year: 14
Fixed-income markets need “a change in mind-set,” asserts BlueMountain Capital Management’s Michael Liberman. “People have to rethink how they operate,” and “new tools” are called for. Last year the $20 billion, New York–based hedge fund firm released a protocol for large corporate-credit transactions that COO Liberman believes can be part of the solution for an asset class plagued by illiquidity. “Trading a large block in credit is incredibly challenging,” explains Liberman, 50, a staunch advocate of open-source technology whom BlueMountain co-founders Andrew Feldstein and Stephen Siderow recruited from Goldman Sachs Group in 2004. Now a managing partner presiding over one of the alternative-investment sector’s most innovative technology shops, Liberman adds: “Banks have tried to create single-dealer platforms. But we believe more of an all-to-all approach is needed.” BlueMountain designed the protocol to bring together the maximum number of traders with interest in a particular security. For the firm’s internal initiatives, Liberman continues to expand his quantitative strategies team — it doubled in 2013, to 40 members, and added ten in 2014 — while regulatory concerns weigh more heavily on management. Liberman says BlueMountain is developing a system to capture a complete picture of its financing — “the cost of it, the capital commitment of it, the certainty of it, and other franchise values and relationship values that exist.”
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 |
