Jerrell Watts is a Managing Director at Merrill Lynch, where he is responsible for managing the global order flow and risk aggregation strategy in equity and equity-linked products. His responsibilities include or overlap with efforts in smart order routing, algorithmic trading, order flow crossing, market making and centralized risk.

Prior to joining Merrill Lynch, he served as a Senior Vice President at Lehman Brothers, where he managed the firm's options market making efforts, including both trading and technology. In that role, he oversaw the development and deployment of Lehman's platform to the ISE, CBOE and PHLX in the US and to Eurex and EuroNext/Liffe in Europe. He was also responsible for delivering a new flow trading platform to Lehman's customer derivatives desks in the US and Europe.

Before that he was a Vice President at Morgan Stanley, where he worked as a quant-developer in the options market making area. There he helped develop and deploy the technology platform to Europe, as a market maker on Eurex and EuroNext/Liffe, and to the US, as one of the first market makers on the ISE.

He started his career in finance as an associate at D.E. Shaw & Co., where he worked as a quant-developer in the firm-wide risk area and on the statistical arbitrage desk.

He holds PhD and Master of Science degrees in Computer Science from the California Institute of Technology and a Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science from the University of Texas at Austin. During his educational career he specialized in high performance computing and massively parallel applications for scientific and engineering problems.