David Ogg, founder and former CEO of both Hotspot FX and LavaFX, announced today the launch of Ogg Trading, LLC, a provider of advanced execution solutions to the global financial services community.
The new venture will leverage Ogg's well-documented success within the foreign exchange markets to bring a host of technological innovations to the FX market and beyond.
David Ogg brings over 25 years of FX and capital markets experience to his latest venture. As the CEO and founder of HotspotFX and LavaFX, Mr. Ogg is widely regarded as a visionary within the foreign exchange markets. Ogg's many accomplishments include being the first to pioneer anonymous FX trading via the prime brokerage community while at HotspotFX, the first to deploy an FX ECN to the buy-side institutional community, and the first to apply sophisticated execution algorithms to the FX ECN market. In addition to launching and successfully managing the growth of HotspotFX and LavaFX, Ogg previously also managed very successful FX trading rooms at Credit Suisse, HSBC, Lehman and Dresdner.
"Our goal at Ogg Trading is to help our clients significantly improve their profitability by providing them with a major competitive edge," explained David Ogg, CEO of Ogg Trading. "Best execution standards in FX are not where they need to be and have consistently lagged behind other markets. When traders calculate the cumulative effect of not achieving best execution they realize this has a major impact on their bottom line. It is our mission at Ogg Trading to bring new profit-enhancing tools and technologies to market that will allow participants to gain execution capabilities that are not available to them in today's marketplace, and we're very excited about that."
Joining Ogg Trading as Chief Operating Officer and Head of Sales in the new venture is Michael Kahn, a 25-year veteran of the FX and capital markets industry. Prior to joining Ogg Trading, Kahn had spent more than 13 years with State Street Global Markets where he successfully managed the rapid growth of that firm's FX trading businesses both in the US and Europe. Prior to State Street, Kahn held senior trading and managemggement positions at Lehman Brothers and Credit Suisse, where he first met and worked alongside David Ogg. Throughout his career he has been a visible member of the institutional FX community, actively serving on the FX market committees of the NY Federal Reserve Bank, the Bank of England, and the European Central Bank.
Ogg Trading has also established a strategic partnership with Pragma Securities, one of the financial industry's leading providers of advanced quantitative and algorithmic trading tools. Pragma is investing significant expertise, resources and technology into Ogg Trading, allowing the firm to leverage Pragma's proven technology and expertise to rapidly deliver superior trading capabilities to the marketplace.
"This is a great partnership for Pragma," said David Mechner, CEO of Pragma Securities. "Ogg Trading will leverage our strong technology platform and experience with equities liquidity aggregation and algorithmic trading to bring unparalleled execution capabilities to its clients in the FX market. Given the Ogg team's history of technological innovation, broad reach, and deep domain expertise in FX, we are confident that together we will have a significant, positive impact in advancing the state of the art in FX execution."
Based in New York City, Ogg Trading will deliver its first offering sometime in the 2nd half of 2011.