Technology firms

TradingScreen
The best plumbing for the buy side

Philippe Buhannic took a big gamble when he left CSFB in the summer of 2000. He'd had a successful career running the firm's futures business, and had recently built PrimeTrade, the bank's proprietary trading vehicle for futures, options and foreign exchange. But so many of his clients kept asking him whether they could see other brokers' prices that he became intrigued by the idea of creating a similar, multi-institution system.

So he quit. But he didn't take the route that so many others did, which was to try to persuade a number of banks to support and fund his idea. Instead Buhannic chose to leave and do the whole project without direct help from banks that might then want to control what he was doing.

He set up shop in a graffiti-riddled building in New York's East Village,...