The 2017 Trading Tech 40: Billy Hult

< Wall Street’s Nerds: The World’s Most Powerful Trading Executives

14. Billy Hult
President
Tradeweb Markets
PNR

It is essential to keep up with the accelerating pace of technological change in financial markets — but, notes Billy Hult, patience is also a virtue because it can take time for cycles to turn favorable. He says that his job is to put Tradeweb Markets, a pioneering fixed-income trading platform operator that has diversified with derivatives and exchange-traded funds, in a position to succeed as market conditions evolve, and 2016 turned out to be a big year for core products like interest rate swaps and mortgage-backed securities. The flurry of activity following the U.S. presidential election had Tradeweb running on all cylinders. “We were beneficiaries of a changing market environment and were positioned well for the conditions postelection,” says Hult, 47, who joined New York–based Tradeweb in 2000 from Société Générale and has been its president since 2008.

On November 9, Tradeweb’s volume of U.S. Treasury securities was almost double its 60-day average and 59 percent higher than on June 27 after the U.K. Brexit vote. November’s $7.9 trillion total for 20-plus products across all Tradeweb platforms was a post–financial crisis record for the company, which launched its first marketplace, for U.S. Treasuries, in 1998 and is currently majority-owned by Thomson Reuters. November saw year-over-year volume increases of 153 percent in credit derivatives, 87 percent in rates derivatives, and 73 percent in cash credit. The last category includes corporate bonds, a business that Tradeweb entered in 2014. “We built a competitive platform and are best positioned to challenge incumbent offerings with more comprehensive trading solutions,” Hult says. “We have been patient and are making significant progress.”

The 2017 Trading Tech 40