Brad Katsuyama Q&A: ‘I Don’t Think We Would Have Survived If It Was Just Hype’
By Matt Levine | October 12, 2016
Photographs by Celeste Sloman
From
Stock exchanges are part of the plumbing of Wall Street, and the details of how they’re run have never exactly captured the public imagination. That changed with
Brad Katsuyama, 38, the co-founder and chief executive officer of
IEX, who brought equity market structure to the mainstream as the hero of
Michael Lewis’s book
Flash Boys. Katsuyama was working as a trader at the Royal Bank of Canada, helping big investors buy stock, when he noticed it was getting increasingly difficult to do so without moving the price. As he investigated, he came to the conclusion that stock exchanges weren’t always looking out for investors’ interests and the market favored high-frequency traders at the expense of long-term investors. (In Lewis’s words, the market was “rigged.”) This led Katsuyama to start IEX, an exchange with a “speed bump” designed to slow down high-frequency traders on behalf of longer-term investors. After a grueling application process
full of fierce resistance, IEX’s Investors Exchange gained approval from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission in June. “We just wanted a chance to compete,” says Katsuyama, who spoke with
Matt Levine of Bloomberg View about the nuances of market structure shortly after the exchange went live in September.
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https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2016-brad-katsuyama-interview/