Date: June 19, 2003
Publication: Wall Street and Technology By: Anthony Guerra

Straight from the Reader's Mouth

Q: How has the downturn in the market changed the nature of your job?

It hasn't been a terribly dramatic change. The largest shift is that a higher percentage of business is coming from professionals. That is the mix in the industry that we are starting to see. The public has only started coming back in more recently, but it really hasn't changed my job all that much.

Q: What is the biggest challenge you face?

I think that staying ahead of the tech curve has been the biggest challenge for us. That will maintain its position as the greatest challenge moving forward. So, since our job is to provide the most efficient execution at the best cost, technology continues to be the answer. Since we get paid to make a difference, technology is going to be what differentiates one service from another.

Q: What will be the most important technology trend in the next five years?

Communications is where the greatest advance has been and will be. I am proud of the new trading systems we have built to be as modular as possible so that if someone comes out with a better GUI, we can incorporate that into our system. We can communicate with more and more systems that our clients might have in place. We based our systems on the idea that any new execution venues that don't exist today will have to use a form of FIX, and we are developing our systems basically to regenerate themselves by taking any piece that can improve our service and plugging it into our system.

Q: What do you consider to be your most important accomplishment over the last year?

I think our new order-delivery and DOT-access system is the greatest accomplishment we have made over the last year which has helped make us much more compatible to custom-trading development than we were. We were first out with that system and, rather than replace it, we started using several different systems until we were using up to four different DOT systems at one point to stay current. We realized that was an approach that was not working because we really didn't have the level of control over the environment that we needed.

Q: What is the most important lesson you can take from the boom of the late '90s followed by the bust of the last few years?

I think you have heard a lot about the fact that history repeats itself. Every boom has been overdone to the point where, finally, reality sets in, but that's where history repeating itself stops. As the market gets more healthy, I think it's a trap to expect it to looks like the markets of the '90s or '80s. It is going to be as unique and divergent as those markets were in their time. It will be something new and we will need new technology to deal with it.

Richard Rosenblatt, President and CEO, Rosenblatt Securities Inc.

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