Luminex Trading & Analytics LLC, a buy side-owned trading venue delivering efficient, low-cost block executions, today announced the hires of three veteran financial and technology professionals, spurred by growing engagement with the platform by its community of investment management firms. Joshua Reed has joined as a Sales and Relationship Manager, Joshua Opper has joined as Director of Infrastructure and Robin Burr has joined as a Software Engineer.

Since its launch in November 2015, trading among Luminex’s participants has grown steadily, as the venue is fulfilling its promise as a destination dedicated to delivering low-cost block trading with minimal information leakage. In September 2019, the latest month for which FINRA data is available, Luminex saw an average natural block trade size of 47,043 shares, placing it among the leaders in FINRA’s 10k block trading category1. Luminex’s October 2019 performance of 166 million shares2 traded makes it one of the firm’s five best months since its inception.

In January of 2019, Luminex announced the rollout of its “Luminex 2.0” interface to simplify workflows and create a more intuitive overall experience. Increased engagement with the platform has spurred new interest from potential participants as well as a rise in existing client demands for further new features and functionalities.

Joshua Reed was most recently a sales trader at Guggenheim Securities, trading equities for mutual funds, asset managers and hedge funds in Boston, Canada, and Connecticut. Prior to Guggenheim, Reed spent much of his 20-year career at Wellington Management in Equity Capital Markets and sector trading.

Joshua Opper was most recently a Managing Partner at Utility Datacenter. He worked extensively with daily operations teams, managing internal operations, assets and vendor selection as he designed and implemented a wide variety of enterprise IT solutions. Prior to Utility Datacenter, he was the Principal Consultant at Par4 Technologies.

Robin Burr comes to Luminex from Placester, Inc, where she was a lead engineer working on account creation, synchronization, integration issues, and custom ETL coding. Prior to that role, she worked at Hitachi Consulting as the lead software engineer.

“Our ability to continually invest in our platform speaks volumes about the commitment that our buy-side community has made to trading on Luminex,” said Jonathan Clark, Luminex CEO. “Our participants are engaged because they want this to work: a trading utility dedicated to helping investment managers exchange blocks safely and at a low cost. Our internal team’s culture mirrors the commitment of our wider community and we’re thrilled to have Joshua Reed, Joshua Opper, and Robin Burr coming aboard.”

Added David Hagen, Head of Product at Luminex, “Every upgrade to our platform is client-driven, from the features we continue to add down to the specific appearance of the GUI. Joshua Opper and Robin Burr are coming to us with proven track records of getting technology to do what users want and need in order to make their own work as effective as possible.”