James Downs

Jim serves as Chief Executive Officer of Connamara Systems, a software engineering company specializing in financial technology.
Previous to founding Connamara systems, Jim Downs was member of the Chicago Board of Trade and Chicago Board Options Exchange.
He founded and managed one of the first CBOE market making groups to take advantage of the opportunities presented by the CBOE with the launch of the Retail Automatic Execution System (RAES).
This was the precursor of electronic options trading as the system automatically matched incoming customer orders to market maker quotes.
Prior to entering the derivatives trading industry, Jim worked for Honeywell Avionics in Minneapolis, Minnesota as a Quality Assurance Engineer and The Central Intelligence Agency, Langley, Virginia as technical project manager and communications engineer.
Jim has a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering from Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana.