Om Malik

From Traders Magazine, February 1998 issue

Traders are busy people, swamped in market data. So how do they find time to use this data effectively? Try market-data systems that are open, interactive and easily welded to other systems and information sources.

Speed and flexibility are the big kahuna.

In what may be a backlash against proprietary hardware, the market-data industry is undergoing a paradigm shift, moving like the rest of Wall Street from terminals and boxes to systems that are open, fast and more malleable.

Utilize Information

Technological change has swept market-data vendors off their feet, forcing them to de-emphasize hardware and to sell systems that utilize information more efficiently.

Perhaps nowhere is this more evident than in the latest avatar of Bridge Information Systems’ Bridge WorkStation, which runs on a 32-bit Windows NT platform. Bridge and many of its competitors are now striving towards making their systems more interactive.

From Traders Magazine, October 1997 issue

When the Pacific Stock Exchange (PCX) received Securities and Exchange Commission approval last month to operate the OptiMark trading system, the pioneer of the new electronic facility, William Lupien, breathed a sigh of relief.

This was one of the many hurdles Lupien had to overcome before his latest brainchild, OptiMark, a black box that executes block orders with unprecedented anonymity, becomes the Instinet of the 21st century. While an Instinet comparison is not entirely fair, it is hard to talk about Lupien’s accomplishments without mentioning the looming presence of Instinet, the trading system he made into a global powerhouse.

Trading Volume

In his five years at Instinet, Lupien, a former PCX specialist trader, presided over a 1,100 percent increase in trading volume, enough for Reuters to pay millions of dollars to acquire the system.

Not satisfied, Lupien now wants to upstage Instinet, starting with