Virtu Financial is one of the biggest electronic market making firms in the world and Doug Cifu is the co-founder and CEO. Virtu trades in 12,000 instruments 24/7, across 235 markets and 36 countries (with a staff of only 140 to boot).
If you’re looking for some mind-blowing numbers, Virtu will often trade more than 4.5 million times each day, and before their IPO in 2015, they reported losing money on just one day between 2009 and 2014… That’s 1,277 days of profit!
More recently, Virtu acquired their rival Knight Capital Group for $1.4 billion, making headlines with the announcement on April 20, 2017.
Outside of Virtu, Doug is also co-owner of the NHL team, the Florida Panthers, along with his Virtu co-founder, Vincent Viola.
Covered in This Interview:
- How Doug went from an 18-year legal career to meeting Vincent Viola and becoming one of the heavy hitters in the electronic market making space.
- Scaling a business—Doug’s method resulted in Virtu’s crazy growth in just 10 years. Essentially, do one thing, do it well, and repeat!
- A peek at Virtu’s trading strategies and how “hitting singles” results in consistent profits. Also tapping into the law of large numbers.
- Doug’s advice for reaching the top levels of entrepreneurial success, as well as his thoughts on ignoring false limits and taking advantage of talent.
Links and Resources:
- Vincent Viola – Wikipedia
- Law of Large Numbers – YouTube
- Virtu Never Loses (Well, Almost Never) – Bloomberg
- Insights into HFT from the Virtu IPO – White Paper
- @DougieLarge – Twitter
- Virtu.com
