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Stock traders wearing Y2K glasses celebrate at the last trading day 1999, where closed up with the historic record of 17,091 points, in the floor of Sao Paulo's Stock Exchange.
- Hitesh Mittal, the former trading head who recently sued broker ITG, is looking to make a big comeback with a new trading technology company.
- Mittal plans to launch the new firm in the next few weeks, he told Business Insider.
- The company is aiming to replace brokers in a key area: execution.
Hitesh Mittal, the former hedge fund trading head who recently sued broker ITG, is looking to make a big comeback with a new trading technology company he's been working on for the past year.
Mittal claimed in a suit that ITG made him out to be a crook, which caused him to be fired from a new job at top quant shop AQR Capital Management.
In 2015, ITG paid more than $20 million in a settlement to the Securities and Exchange Commission. The regulator accused ITG of betting against clients, despite having said it would not do so, in a pilot program known as "Project Omega." Mittal accuses ITG of placing blame of the project onto him which resulted in his subsequent termination from AQR.
Now, Business Insider has learned that Mittal has been working on his own firm since August 2017. Mittal told Business Insider in an interview that his firm, BestEx Research Group, is preparing to launch its first product in the coming weeks.
The company would replace brokers - like his former employee ITG - in a key area: execution.
Typically, when a money manger is looking to get a trade done they go to a broker. Then, that broker uses its technology to figure out how that trade will get best executed.
Mittal's plan is to provide algos to investment firms - such as hedge funds and other asset managers - which they can use instead of the technology provided by a broker. The broker would just be responsible for routing the trade to an exchange.
He says that the company's goal is to lower costs for asset managers because they don't have to spend time and money building those algorithms in-house.