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

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

1. Richard Prager BlackRock 2. Chris Isaacson Bats Global Markets 3. Bradley Peterson Nasdaq Advisors and Their Clients Call for New Asset Classes in Model Portfolios Sponsored by BlackRock May 6, 2025 4. Brad Levy MarkitSERV 5. Dan Keegan Citi

6. Glenn Lesko Bloomberg Tradebook 7. Bryan Durkin CME Group 8. Mayur Kapani Intercontinental Exchange 9. Mike Blum KCG Holdings 10. Raj Mahajan Goldman Sachs Group

11. Ronald DePoalo Fidelity Institutional 12. Nick Themelis MarketAxess Holdings 13. Jenny Knott NEX Optimisation 14. Billy Hult Tradeweb Markets 15. Rob Park IEX Group

16. Bill Chow & Richard Leung Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing 17. John Mackay (Mack) Gill MillenniumIT 18. Paul Hamill Citadel Securities 19. Eric Noll Convergex 20. Veronica Augustsson Cinnober Financial Technology

21. Tyler Moeller & Joshua Walsky Broadway Technology 22. Alasdair Haynes Aquis Exchange 23. Gaurav Suri Arcesium 24. Manoj Narang Mana Partners 25. Michael Chin & Neill Penney Thomson Reuters

26. Robert Sloan S3 Partners 27. Anton Katz & Stephen Mock AQR Capital Management 28. Donal Byrne Corvil 29. Stu Taylor Algomi 30. Alfred Eskandar Portware

31. Steven Randich Financial Industry Regulatory Authority 32. R. Cromwell Coulson OTC Markets Group 33. Peter Maragos Dash Financial 34. John Fawcett Quantopian 35. Donald Ross III PDQ Enterprises

36. Jennifer Nayar Vela Trading Technologies 37. Dan Raju Tradier 38. Susan Estes OpenDoor Trading 39. David Mercer LMAX Exchange 40. Oki Matsumoto Monex Group