Person to Watch: Brad Katsuyama

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 There are few things that I love more than a truth seeker and that is exactly what Canadian stock trader Brad Katsuyama of IEX has proven to be, they're calling him the 'Wolf Hunter of Wall Street.'

Katsuyama took it into his own hands to get to the bottom of why he felt like the stock exchange was rigged. One day he realized that everything had changed and it was as though the stock market knew what he was thinking before he had time to place a trade. He would tee up a trade for a number of shares at a certain dollar amount and the market would only be able to fill some percentage of that order leaving the rest of the order unfilled and the price of the stock slightly higher. In order to fill the order, he would have to pay the higher rate. 

The culprit, high frequency traders, who had laid dedicated fiber optic lines between the stock exchanges. When Katsuyama would place a trade, the high frequency traders could see where his first trade was filled and beat him to the other exchanges in order to raise the price.

In researching this further, Katsuyama found out this practice was not illegal so he took matters in to his own hands starting a stock exchange called IEX that has a special software and hardware configuration that stops high frequency traders. Essentially, a high frequency trade spools on a 100 miles of fiber optic cable, allowing the regular speed trades to place at the same time as the high frequency ones. 

Katsuyama was recently endorsed by Goldman Sacs and top executives have sited that his ideas are "a model for a more stable and less complicated stock market."

Katsuyama is selling trust and transparency, two very foreign concepts on Wall Street, many believe that he will be very successful and could be the future of the stock market, because what could be more powerful than restoring trust back to the market? I can't imagine how many people on Wall Street are plotting his demise... 

Check out the full story here.