When I started trading, executing a trade meant picking up the phone and working your relationships. It was a human business—intuitive, personal, and anything but automated.
Three decades later, I've watched trading transform beyond recognition. The tools have changed, the pace of markets has accelerated, and the structure of trading itself has been rewritten.
The only constant has been – and still is – the need to evolve alongside it.
Over the course of my career, I’ve gone from making phone calls and writing paper tickets to helping firms harness electronic trading through platforms like RealTick—leveraging algorithms, automation, and now, artificial intelligence,
This year marks a major milestone: 30 years in trading for me, and 40 years of innovation for RealTick. It’s a parallel evolution that reflects not just how far the industry has come, but how technology and experience together enable traders to adapt and innovate while staying grounded in the fundamentals.
In this post, I reflect on that journey—both personal and professional—exploring the evolution of trading and how continuous innovation enabled RealTick to keep pace with an ever-changing industry.
When Relationships Drove the Market
When I first started, trading was an intensely human business.
While electronic systems existed as early as the 1970s, for decades they functioned more like digital assistants rather than decision-support. Prices might appear on a screen, but executing a trade still meant picking up the phone. Liquidity wasn’t something you accessed with an algorithm; it was something you found through relationships.
My first glimpse into that world came from an unlikely source: at a time when Wall Street was overwhelmingly male dominated, my mother was a trader. She built a career in the industry that spanned decades. Through her, I was introduced to the market at a young age, spending time around traders, watching how orders moved, and seeing firsthand how the market functioned day to day.
It was organized chaos—loud, fast, and full of energy. Executing a trade meant calling a counterparty you knew by name and negotiating in real time.
In those days, relationships weren’t just important—they were the market.
Traders knew exactly who they were dealing with, and reputation carried real weight. Accountability was built into every interaction. You stood by your prices, your word, and your performance.
Back then, liquidity wasn’t anonymous, it was personal.
There was inefficiency, of course. Paper tickets were literally thrown into bins behind desks, entered manually later in the day, and somehow reconciled by the next morning.
By today’s standards, it sounds almost impossible. And yet, it worked.
When Trading Technology Changed the Game
The late 1990s marked a turning point. The rise of NASDAQ’s technology-driven model gained prominence, the shift from fractions to decimals tightened spreads, and more robust data feeds gave traders a clearer, faster view of the market.
Suddenly, markets moved faster—and volumes surged.
The dot-com era brought unprecedented participation, particularly from retail investors. I remember trading desks struggling to keep up. Orders poured in faster than humans could process them, forcing firms to look for new, technology-driven ways to manage the volume.
That’s when algorithmic strategies like VWAP and TWAP began to take hold—not to replace traders, but to support them. Automation handled smaller and lower-touch orders, freeing traders to focus on complex execution, client relationships, and sourcing harder-to-find liquidity.
This was also the moment when electronic trading began to take scale.
While the New York Stock Exchange was still driven by activity on the floor, NASDAQ’s structure was inherently more technology-led. It created the conditions for early execution management systems like RealTick to emerge, giving traders new tools to navigate an increasingly fast-moving market.
But with each technological leap came trade-offs. As markets became more electronic, personal interaction began to fade. Anonymous quotes replaced phone calls. Liquidity fragmented across venues instead of being concentrated among known counterparties.
Newly Electronic Markets, New Challenges
In the 1990s and early 2000s, there was a stretch where the pendulum swung a bit too far.
Markets became so electronic that pricing could feel disconnected. Executing even relatively small orders could move a stock more than expected, as everyone tried to figure out what was happening in real time.
Even today, some of those challenges remain. Finding liquidity and getting trades done at the right price—especially in a more virtual, fragmented environment—is still not always straightforward.
But back then, the industry itself was shifting. Former sell-side traders moved to hedge funds and buy-side firms, bringing with them the tools they were accustomed to using—platforms like RealTick.
That transition helped establish Execution Management Systems as foundational infrastructure, not optional technology.
Platforms like RealTick gave traders a centralized way to manage orders, access liquidity across multiple venues, and integrate algorithmic strategies into their workflow. They brought speed, visibility, and control to a process that had become too complex to handle manually, allowing traders to navigate fragmented markets and execute with far greater precision.
Yet even as tools advanced, something was missing.
In the past, accountability was obvious—you knew exactly who was on the other side of a trade.
With electronic trading, decisions are often embedded in algorithms, hidden behind logic and routing strategies. Traders are left asking difficult questions: How do I know this was the best execution? Where did my order really go? Why did liquidity vanish just when I needed it?
As markets moved faster and became more fragmented, familiar points of contact gave way to systems and strategies that were harder to see—and harder to question. New complexities were emerging, and with them, new demands on technology to provide transparency, insight, and control.
Innovation That Meets Real-World Trading Demands
RealTick’s role throughout this evolution has been consistent: delivering solutions that meet these real-world trading challenges.
Automated trading is a clear example. RealTick was one of the earliest providers of automated trading capabilities that could reduce operational strain while preserving oversight and control.
Tools like algo wheels extend that idea further, helping traders manage execution choices and commission decisions with less manual friction. The objective wasn’t to remove human judgment, but to create more space for it so traders could focus their attention where it adds the most value.
We saw the value of this feature in the post-COVID environment. As a tight labor market made it harder to add headcount, firms deepened their reliance on trading technology, using automation to manage volume and operate more efficiently with leaner teams.
As markets continue to evolve, so does the platform. The rise of new asset classes, including crypto and the early development of tokenized markets, along with ongoing shifts in trading workflows, has required continuous adaptation.
RealTick has evolved alongside those changes, with a growing emphasis on API-driven connectivity and model-based trading environments—recognizing that point-and-click interfaces alone won’t define the next phase of the market.
This isn’t about preserving legacy technology. It’s about staying relevant to how trading actually works today—and how it will work in the future.
Lessons Learned Through Experience
Over the years, I’ve seen markets move through moments that left lasting marks: the dot-com collapse, September 11th, the financial crisis, and the pandemic. Each revealed different kinds of risk – not only in portfolios, but in people’s lives and livelihoods.
I still remember 2008, seeing firms emptying out in a single day, people carrying boxes through lobbies out to the street, careers shifting abruptly without warning.
Those moments have a way of instilling discipline. They reinforce the importance of fundamentals over narrative, and experience over momentum. Markets tend to swing too far in one direction before correcting—and that pattern may well apply to today’s enthusiasm around artificial intelligence.
There is no question that AI will shape the future of trading. But experience also calls for perspective alongside optimism. Technology can deliver extraordinary efficiency, yet periods of rapid adoption can also surface new risks—whether in workflow gaps, operational blind spots, or unintended impacts on how firms are structured and staffed.
Experience + Innovation = Successful Evolution
The pendulum swings. It always does.
RealTick’s confidence doesn’t come from predicting what comes next, but from having lived through change repeatedly. Decades of evolution, market cycles, and technological shifts have shaped a platform—and a mindset—built around adaptability.
Markets will continue to change. Trading will continue to evolve. But the value of innovation combined with experience remains constant.
That’s the real lesson of these many years, and the one that continues to guide what comes next.
Learn more about how RealTick drives the way traders operate today.
