Brad Katsuyama

Brad Katsuyama worked at Royal Bank of Canada in New York, where he noticed that large stock orders were being front-run — prices would move against his orders before they were fully executed. He discovered this was being done systematically by high-frequency traders who had co-located servers at exchanges and used speed advantages to detect and act on institutional orders. After investigating the problem thoroughly, he left RBC to found IEX in 2012. IEX introduced the "speed bump" — a 350-microsecond delay coiled fiber optic cable — that neutralized many HFT latency advantages. Michael Lewis featured Katsuyama's story in his 2014 book "Flash Boys," which sparked a national debate about market fairness. IEX became a registered exchange in 2016 and has been a persistent advocate for market structure reform favoring long-term investors over speed-based trading strategies.