The 2017 Trading Tech 40: Eric Noll

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

19. Eric Noll
President and Chief Executive Officer
Convergex
Last year: 21

In Eric Noll, institutional investors have a voice in Washington. The president and CEO of agency-focused brokerage Convergex has for the past two years served on the Securities and Exchange Commission’s Equity Market Structure Advisory Committee, representing his buy-side clients’ interests. The 54-year-old chairs the panel’s market quality subcommittee, which in November delivered recommendations on the National Market System antivolatility proposal known as Limit Up–Limit Down, marketwide circuit breakers, and uniform opening time.

Convergex was in turnaround mode when Noll, a former Susquehanna International Group and Nasdaq executive, joined in 2013. Today, serving 3,000 clients around the world, it is active in high-touch and electronic trading, prime brokerage, clearing, and commission management. In “ETFs — You’re (Probably) Doing It Wrong,” one of a series of recent thought papers, Noll observed that trading in the instruments is highly concentrated; 1 percent of the 1,976 U.S.-listed ETFs have almost half of the total assets under management, and many investors are missing out on some top performers. He put in a plug for Convergex’s ETF Direct, where clients can “source multiple quotes in all U.S.-listed ETFs” and find block-size liquidity without payment for order flow or hidden fees.

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