Fairfield County Business Journal 111014

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FAIRFIELD COUNTY

BUSINESS JOURNAL YOUR ONLY SOURCE FOR REGIONAL BUSINESS NEWS | westfaironline.com

November 10, 2014 | VOL. 50, No. 45

FCBJ this week CLASS ADDRESS A three-building complex on Greenwich Avenue gets an upgrade … 4

THE KID-GLOVE TREATMENT

FLASH BOY FAIRFIELD ALUMNUS REMAKES TRADING

BY CRYSTAL KANG ckang@westfairinc.com

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CLASS IN SESSION McGladrey hosts a series of tech-themed seminars on the web … 7 CLASS JAMS The School of Rock – with three Fairfield County locations – expands across the border … 11 CLASS ACT Xerox helps track Ebola patients via the cloud … 15

MEDIA PARTNER

Mickey, left, and Jeff Alexander. Photo by Bill Fallon

FLEXIBILITY SUSTAINS 60-YEAR-OLD BUSINESS BY BILL FALLON bfallon@westfairinc.com

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ommerce Packaging Corp. recently shipped a 5,000-pound electronics package to Dubai. The Dubai-bound crate was still open while principals Mickey Alexander, father, and Jeff Alexander, son, pointed to details of the craft of custom shipping, which factors carpentry, physics, engineering and materials science with carved-in-stone delivery dates. When 10 tons or a few critical ounces absolutely, positively has to get there — perhaps in packaging certifiably free of microbes — Commerce Packaging offers a shipping solution. “The only thing fixed is the delivery date,” Mickey Alexander, 71 and a Michigan Stateeducated engineer, said of Commerce’s deadline-driven business. “There can be problems

with manufacturing, with testing, delays along the supply chain, but the delivery date is the delivery date. It does not change.” Jeff Alexander, 40, with an MBA from New York University, said that, as such, the company stocks the required materials for unusual jobs and is ready to pack and ship when the client calls. “We just did a Sunday job like that,” he said. In 2000, Commerce Packaging consolidated its four offices, including a Stamford presence dating to 1954, at 305 Wilson Ave. in Norwalk, across from the SoNo Ice House skating facility. The 70,000-square-foot site hosts Commerce’s manufacturing and warehouse space and administrative offices, plus active loading docks for six to 10 company vehicles, including an 18-wheeler. “This shipment has to handle a lot of different environments,” Mickey Alexander said of the Dubai crate. “Not just the air environment — it’s protected from that, of course. Then there is motion on highways, motion on rolling seas and forklift handling. These can be critical and expensive parts. They can be integral » CRATES, page 6

onan Ryan, chief strategy officer of IEX Group Inc., who was featured in “Flash Boys,” the 2014 Michael Lewis book that sold 130,000 copies in its first week, was invited to share his story at his alma mater, Fairfield University, recently. In Ryan’s world, fortunes are made and lost in the blink of an eye and 350 microseconds is a game-changer. Before co-founding IEX, Ryan, who has nine years’ experience in the financial services industry and more than 17 years’ experience in networking infrastructure, was the head of electronic trading at RBC Capital Markets, a Canadian investment bank. During his time there, his first title was highfrequency trading specialist. Working under his boss, Brad Katsuyama, Ryan and his team faced major frustrations when it came to electronic trading because each time a trade was executed, buyers couldn’t obtain the full shares at the price they saw. “Let’s say I see 50,000 shares on the offer at a price, and I want to buy it at that price,” Ryan said. “Every time I press the button to go and buy it, I only get filled in on 50 percent of it. And the 50 percent I didn’t buy is now a penny or two pennies more. But when I try to get the remaining 50 percent, that disappears as well and now it’s Ronan Ryan, co-founder and up three pennies.” chief strategy officer of IEX Katsuyama, who Group Inc. was the head of electronic sales and trading at Royal Bank of Canada at the time, and Ryan soon discovered through Katsuyama’s efforts that SAC Capital Advisors (now Point 72 Asset Management), Steven Cohen’s hedge fund, had the same problem as RBC. “SAC Capital would see 100,000 of shares at a price and buy it, but only get filled on 50,000 » FLASH, page 17


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