Double Play: How This Company Profits from Both Trade Wars and America's Digital Mortgage Revolution

In the summer of 2000, as the dot-com bubble was beginning to burst, a former power company executive sat in Atlanta pondering the inefficiencies of energy trading. The entire industry relied on phone calls, handshakes, and paper contracts. While the internet was transforming other industries, energy trading remained stubbornly analog.

This executive had a vision: what if you could bring the reliability and transparency of electronic trading to the opaque world of energy markets? What if you could create a platform that would standardize contracts, eliminate counterparty risk, and make price discovery instantaneous?

It seemed like a pipe dream at the time. The established players had deep relationships built over decades. Traders were comfortable with their phones and their Rolodexes. Why fix what wasn't broken?

But then came Enron's collapse in 2001, sending shockwaves through the energy trading world. Suddenly, everyone was worried about counterparty risk. The old way of doing business didn't seem so reliable anymore. The timing was perfect for a digital revolution.

Starting with a simple electronic platform for trading energy futures, this company began to grow. But its founder wasn't content with just disrupting energy trading. He saw bigger opportunities. Much bigger.

Over the next two decades, through a series of bold acquisitions and technological innovations, this small Atlanta-based startup transformed itself into one of the most important financial infrastructure companies in the world. Today, it operates dozen of exchanges, clearinghouses, and data services across every major asset class: stocks, bonds, commodities, derivatives, and even cryptocurrencies.

Its technology processes millions of transactions worth trillions of dollars every day. Its data services are essential to financial institutions worldwide. And its original energy trading platform? It's still going strong, now part of a global empire that connects markets across continents.

The company's rise reflects a broader transformation in global finance – from analog to digital, from regional to global, from opaque to transparent. And it all started with one executive's vision to bring the energy trading world into the digital age.