In summer 1996, I met Mattias Jansson and Lukas Lüthy (left and Luki middle above, I am at the right), as well as Adrian Lucas (left below) and in what seemed to be less than 15m, they were inviting me to join them set up a software company to develop a non-proprietary derivative market making system. Another key partner in this story is Stig Hubertsson (not shown). Therefore, we found ourselves co-founding QT Software, which later was renamed Actant.
First the cheering: Still now Actant software is known to be the fastest non-proprietary derivative trading software. And while I don't have the numbers, I could well believe that they compete well with proprietary derivative trading software on classical hardware (meaning CPUs and not FPGAs).
And we might mention golden years of early 2000's when two of the top three European derivative market making firms were relying on Actant's product to do their business.
Mattias, Luki, and I were the core the company's engineering. Like minded, we worked much as one, relying on voting to resolve the sometimes disagreement, and on the way, shaped a unique company with its specific market niche and customers.
That first picture above was taken in early 2018. Two hours later we were out of the house watching the fireman putting out the fire of the gas barbecue grill. Luckily no one was hurt, the gas tank did not explode, and house suffered only minimal damage. We then cooked our steaks in the oven and enjoyed an evening of great friendship.
The second picture is LIFFE Connect advertisement in the Financial Times!
In 1998, QT software was running on LIFFE Connect and Eurex. For the LIFFE Connect opening, which was first electronic access to the LIFFE exchange, we were asked to help publicise the new exchange offering. Adrian is to the left of that picture, and I on the right. Funny story, we showed up for the photoshoot at the exchange. They offered to walk down to the trading floor, but then proceeding to disallow Adrian's brown shoes, as only black shoes were allowed there!
One insight I gained in market making was how to model distributed systems with "adjoint" relations. The date was October 2008, a difficult period because of the impact of the 2007 crisis on our customers. I was lying in bed at our company's yearly executive get-together at the Palace Hotel Lucerne, and it occurred to me that one could model the market maker as some form of adjoint dual to the market of buyers and sellers. Years later I used that insight to co-found Elevence Digital Finance where we developed a language of rights and obligations sustained by a dual adjunction like relation to a blockchain ledger (see BearingPoint's announcement when Elevence was acquired by Digital Asset).
Anecdote: to whom do you go for a market making product in 2021 for derivative cryptocurrencies? Actant of course, they are leader in non-proprietary cryptocurrency derivative market making systems!
All original content copyright James Litsios, 2019.