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Even though Canadian trader Brad Katsuyama had found the elusive answers to a question that baffled even the most powerful Wall Street investors, he had a tough time, at first, even getting a meeting in the executive offices of one of the top financial firms in the United States.

The Markham, Ont.-native worked in the Manhattan offices of the Royal Bank of Canada, a bit player in Wall Street eyes, and was armed with a degree from Wilfrid Laurier University, not an ivy-league pedigree school.

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But after a few minutes with Mr. Katsuyama, it was clear he had cracked the code of the next frontier of finance: how some high-frequency trading firms game the stock-market system to skim profits in a fraction of the time it would take to blink an eye, and how his software could get around this.

“I think at first, when I walk into the office, I’m not impressing anyone, right?” said Mr. Katsuyama, in a phone interview from New York. “But after five minutes of talking, I think I had their attention. It is kind of nice that it had more to do with what I was saying and not what I looked like.”