At Knight, Browne’s team served as lead market maker for 38 percent of all ETFs on the New York Stock Exchange. Every ETF is required to have a lead market maker, or LMM -- a firm that is under contract to the exchange to provide pricing at all times and typically commits capital to establish a new fund’s initial liquidity. In the latter role, Browne made Knight the go-to firm for small and midsize providers hoping to introduce the next big thing in ETFs.
The Godfather
‘‘After the investor, the LMM is probably the most critical piece for a new ETF,” says Adam Patti, founder and CEO of IndexIQ Inc., a New York–based sponsor of ETFs that focus on alternative investment strategies. “That’s why Reggie’s the godfather.”
Browne is getting back into the lead-market-maker business this year, as ETF providers move their business from KCG and other firms to Cantor.
Browne’s ardor for finance began at home in Philadelphia. While his father was in uniform for the Air Force, his mother worked in merchant banking at Mellon Bank Corp. It was his grandmother, a fan of the late television investment guru Louis Rukeyser, who inspired Reggie’s love of the markets. She bought him a gift subscription to Money magazine when he was 12, prompting his first attempt to place a trade. He had a broker on the phone from penny-stock specialist Blinder Robinson & Co. before his mother intervened.
“I had pennies, so I wanted penny stocks,” he laughs.
When he was a 15-year-old Eagle Scout in 1984, he was among a group of local teens chosen by the Union League of Philadelphia for its annual Good Citizenship Awards.
Summer Job
As part of the program, he was paired with a local business leader. He told the league his interests lay in finance, so he was introduced to Randy Gilmore, then a senior executive at the Philadelphia Stock Exchange. Browne parlayed that into a summer job at the exchange, which turned into a full-time job after high school. He attended Philadelphia’s La Salle University part time, earning a bachelor’s degree in finance in six years.
“That’s not because I couldn’t pay for college but because I wanted to work full time,” he says. Browne was a football lineman in high school but left sports behind when he entered La Salle.