Raymond Deux and the business of one more question

On October 4, 2011, Raymond Deux had an appointment with people who had questions. Advanced questions. At an earlier webinar, members of a trading community had asked enough technical ones that Deux and the host decided to give the questions a session of their own. The president and CEO of NinjaTrader would be back at 4:30 in the afternoon, Eastern time. Bring the difficult bits.

There was a prize, too: a six-month NinjaTrader 7 Multi-Broker license, valued at $495, which Deux contributed for a raffle. It was a suitably practical inducement for this particular audience. A trading platform’s customers already have plenty of things flashing at them. Another stretch of software access has the advantage of being useful after the excitement wears off.

The appointment makes a good entrance into Deux’s story. He founded NinjaTrader in 2003. Its subsequent history includes software releases, a move into brokerage, outside investment, and eventually an acquisition by Kraken. Yet the smaller encounter preserves something the transaction chronology can flatten: the founder, available to an audience interested in exactly how his product worked.

The questions got their own afternoon

A technical Q&A has a different rhythm from a product announcement. An announcement can choose its subjects. A user has a particular problem and would rather discuss that. For a founder, appearing in such a setting means letting the conversation move toward the edges of the product, where a feature becomes an expectation and an expectation becomes another request.

The 2011 session was arranged around those requests. Its host explained that members had asked advanced technical questions during the previous appearance. Deux and the host therefore planned a presentation focused on answering the community. That is a modest anecdote, with a useful amount of detail. The subject was the platform. The participants were its users. The reason for returning was that they wanted more.

There is no need to turn a webinar into a grand declaration of character. It shows a concrete choice about where the CEO spent time. In a business selling tools to active traders, the users’ knowledge is part of the working environment. They arrive with experience, preferences, and the occasional question that resists a tidy slide.

Three hundred ways to be useful

The product those traders were discussing had recently undergone a substantial revision. NinjaTrader 7 launched in December 2010 with more than 300 changes. Its capabilities included expanded backtesting, optimization, and a hot key manager. These are the sorts of improvements that can look unglamorous in a general business story and matter a great deal to somebody who has to use them.

Deux connected the work to a growing ecosystem of clients, partners, and third-party developers. Each group had requirements. The release therefore belonged to a continuing negotiation between the platform and the people building their routines around it. A software company earns another set of demands when the previous version becomes useful enough to depend on.

At the time, NinjaTrader offered charting, analysis, system development, and simulation through a free application, with live trading supported through brokerage relationships. That arrangement put several kinds of work close together: examining a market, rehearsing an approach, writing a system, and eventually placing an order. Deux’s company occupied the desktop where those activities met.

A founder in that position has a peculiar view of the customer’s day. The company can improve what happens inside its application while remaining dependent on arrangements beyond it. Eventually, improving the product may raise a larger question about the business. In NinjaTrader’s case, that question acquired a very concrete answer in 2014.

When the software met the broker

On June 30, NinjaTrader announced the acquisition of Mirus Futures and the introduction of NinjaTrader Brokerage. Mirus had been a partner for more than a decade. The expansion brought brokerage services into a business that traders already knew for its platform. Deux was the founder and CEO, and his explanation centered on frustrations he had observed in brokerage.

He put the commitment this way:

“Our dedication to providing an exceptional client experience will remain paramount within NinjaTrader Brokerage.”

Raymond Deux, June 2014

The transaction changed the scope of what the company could address. An interface can help someone manage an order, but a brokerage relationship includes service and account arrangements as well. Bringing the two together gives a business more influence over the experience. It also gives its customers another reason to expect the company to sort things out.

NinjaTrader Brokerage initially offered clients Dorman Trading as their futures commission merchant. The announcement also said existing platform users would not have to change their brokerage relationships. The expansion thus involved both a new direct service and an existing network. That is a more involved task than placing a different name on a login screen.

For Deux’s story, the important change is the perimeter of responsibility. A business founded around trading software was now offering brokerage services. The customer’s frustrations had become a reason to enter another line of work. The feature request had grown up and acquired an account application.

A company has a hometown, too

By 2015, NinjaTrader had a different kind of recognition to discuss. It was selected as one of the Colorado Companies to Watch, a group of 50 chosen from 1,024 nominations. Deux spoke about local economic contribution and the opportunity to create jobs. The product might connect to markets elsewhere; the organization also employed people with careers to build.

That emphasis broadens the portrait. Trading software is easily described through screens, calculations, and execution. A company is also a place where somebody spends a working week. Deux’s remarks treated employment and the environment for employees’ development as responsibilities that came with growth. The Colorado award gave him an occasion to talk about them publicly.

The distinction was a company award, and it belongs in Deux’s career with that qualification intact. It recognized an organization he had founded and was leading. Its value in this story is partly the shift in subject: from what the platform enabled traders to do to what the business enabled employees to do.

There was recognition from traders as well. In March 2015, NinjaTrader announced readers’ awards from Stocks & Commodities and wins in TraderPlanet’s STAR awards for both its platform and brokerage. Deux described those votes as a way of assessing support and service. The timing made the brokerage result particularly relevant: the service had been introduced the previous year. It was an early response to a business decision that had enlarged the company’s obligations. The announcement also credited the wider community of users and ecosystem partners, a reminder of how many people were involved in making the platform useful.

Five hundred requests, another release

NinjaTrader 8 launched in November 2016. The company described more than 500 user driven enhancements, including changes to performance, navigation, and analysis. Deux was still founder and CEO. Six years after version 7, the product was again being presented as the result of demands from the people using it.

The release figures should be read on their own terms. Three hundred changes in one version and five hundred enhancements in another do not form a reliable measure of software quality. The counts describe different releases. What connects them is a recurring explanation: the platform had to evolve alongside its users’ requirements.

Deux’s name also appears in the technical pages of Stocks & Commodities. In May 2014, he and Chelsea Bell were credited on a NinjaTrader contribution showing how to obtain and use a scanner implementation. In July 2018, he and Jim Dooms were credited on a contribution involving a deviation-scaled moving average.

Those bylines do not establish who wrote each piece of code. They do place his name beside practical instructions, downloads, and examples, as well as beside corporate announcements. The combination is worth keeping in view. A founder’s public work can include the small explanations that help customers use a product, alongside the larger decisions that change the company providing it.

The founder steps back from the desk

Over time, Deux’s work shifted toward the boardroom. In 2020, he was identified as founder and executive chairman when Salomon Sredni joined NinjaTrader’s board. Sredni had previously led TradeStation. Deux welcomed the experience Sredni brought in understanding active traders and delivering tools for them. It was a connection between people who had spent years around the same demanding customer.

An April 2024 company disclosure gave a precise description of Deux’s responsibilities. He was executive chairman, provided input on strategic direction, and was outside day-to-day operations. His primary business location was Colorado. The distinction matters: the founder remained associated with the company, while operating responsibility belonged elsewhere.

Then the company he had started entered another chapter. Kraken announced an agreement to buy NinjaTrader for $1.5 billion in March 2025 and confirmed completion on May 1. Its announcement described a business serving nearly two million traders. Twenty-two years separated NinjaTrader’s founding from that completed acquisition.

The later transaction supplies a date and a price. Deux’s part of the story comes into focus through the earlier decisions: returning for the technical questions, releasing the next version, expanding into brokerage, and eventually contributing from a different seat. The work changed as the company grew. Back in 2011, the next item on the calendar had been simpler: 4:30, Eastern, and whatever the traders wanted to ask.