Peak6

Alphacution Press: Time Magazine on Peak6 Co-Founder Jenny Just

"I tell women, ‘You don’t have to be a trader the rest of your life. But if you can understand options, you can sit at any table in any industry, in any position, and understand what’s going on with the money. And that’s where all the decisions are.' "Jenny Just, Co-Founder, Peak6 This one lands a little close to home for me... Jenny Just and I were contemporaries - in both cases, our first jobs out of college; in both cases, within the equity options group - at O'Connor & Associates (OCA) in the early 1990's. Since then, we've been on dramatically different journeys, as explained in Time Magazine's recent profile "The Female Billionaire Thinks the Secret to Women's Wealth Is Poker." by editor-at-large, Belinda Luscombe... It will not mean much to most readers here, however, to be quoted in the same paragraph as "the brain" - Clay Struve - around which so much of OCA's success was built is quite an achievement, particularly from the perspective of my younger [...]

By |2024-11-12T21:54:17-05:00July 27th, 2023|Press|
Read More

Peak6 Investments and the Baking Soda Index

"For every action in nature there is an equal and opposite reaction." - Sir Isaac Newton   The performance - or, health - of complex systems is difficult to measure. Typically, you need deviations from norms across numerous sensors - the analytics - converging to signal whether a complex system is functioning properly or not. Add the inevitability of change, and the task becomes exponentially more challenging as continuity of measurement over time decays... And then, there's the stuff that's difficult to measure, if it's measured at all. The intangibles. The slippage factors that don't come into play until they do. Like, a global pandemic - or when a frustrated segment of the population spills out into the streets in cities - big and small - across the landscape... The indicators most commonly used to signal the health of our complex markets may no longer serve their stated purposes. For instance, does the VIX still measure fear? Aside from today's notable spike, the equity markets appeared to have returned to normal volatility [...]

By |2020-08-17T07:14:01-04:00June 12th, 2020|For Subscribers|
Read More

Virtu Financial: More Acquisitions on the Way, If…

When we launched our first trading program at Quantlab in the late 90's, we didn't have direct market access yet. We generated an order list (overnight) that was worked throughout the subsequent market session at the discretion of an algo-equipped executing broker; some of whom now roam the halls at Jefferies / Leucadia. This was the era when 1- to 3-day portfolio turnover was considered fast - SOES bandits were still a thing - and Schwab would soon acquire electronic trading pioneer, CyBerCorp, from Philip Berber - a short drive down the road from our Houston headquarters in Austin, TX. Of course, everyone had nicknames then - as I suspect they still do now. Ed Bosarge, founder of what eventually became Quantlab (after at least 3 prior related incarnations that began for me around 1996), was known as Dr. Evil. Let's just say it's a hair-raising story about a swashbuckling pioneer of applied math involving a hideous toupee... I was known as Mr. Bigglesworth - or, "Bigsy" for short. No [...]

By |2020-10-05T21:19:11-04:00March 27th, 2018|Open|
Read More