100 companies, 751 moves

The crypto trading firm Sam Bankman-Fried founded in Berkeley, California in late 2017. It began with a real, nameable edge: cross-border bitcoin arbitrage while capital controls and slow banking kept Asian prices above US prices. It became the main market maker and backstop liquidity provider on FTX, the exchange Bankman-Fried launched in 2019, and ended as the vehicle through which FTX customers

The Greenwich, Connecticut multi-strategy hedge fund that Nicholas Maounis founded in 2000 with ~$600m and a convertible-arbitrage team. It let one natural-gas trader, Brian Hunter, build the largest positions in the US natural-gas futures market. At times Amaranth held 40% of all NYMEX open interest in the winter months and 75% in the November 2006 contract (Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Inves

The Greenwich, Connecticut quantitative manager that Cliff Asness, David Kabiller, John Liew and Robert Krail founded in 1998 after leaving Goldman Sachs Asset Management's quantitative research group. It is the firm that publishes the factors it trades — value, momentum, carry, defensive (low risk, "betting against beta"), quality and trend, across stocks, bonds, currencies and commodities — and

The New York family office of Sung Kook "Bill" Hwang, a former Tiger Management analyst whose hedge fund Tiger Asia had settled SEC insider-trading and manipulation charges and pleaded guilty to a criminal charge in December 2012. Archegos used total return swaps with about ten prime brokers to build concentrated, levered long positions in a handful of US media and Chinese internet stocks. Accordi

The London systematic manager founded in September 1997 by four AHL alumni — Anthony Todd, Martin Lueck, Michael Adam and Eugene Lambert — that has run its flagship Aspect Diversified Programme, a medium-term trend-following strategy, continuously since December 1998 and has stayed a trend specialist while its sibling Winton moved away. The flagship's record shows the trend cycle in one firm: +27.

The London merchant bank founded in 1762 that was brought down in February 1995 by one 28-year-old trader in Singapore. Nick Leeson ran Barings Futures (Singapore) (BFS), which began trading on the Singapore International Monetary Exchange (SIMEX) on 1 Jul 1992; two days later he opened account 88888, an "error account" he used for unauthorised positions and had excluded from reports to London (Si

The derivatives book that Warren Buffett ran personally inside Berkshire Hathaway, the Omaha conglomerate, from about 2004 to its run-off in the early 2020s. Its centre was 47 long-dated, European-style, at-the-money put options on four equity indices (the S&P 500, FTSE 100, Euro Stoxx 50 and Nikkei 225). They were sold in 2004–08 for $4.8bn of premiums (2010 letter; the 2008 letter gives $4.9bn a

The offshore crypto derivatives exchange — run by HDR Global Trading Ltd. — that invented the instrument crypto now trades most. Arthur Hayes, Benjamin Delo and Samuel Reed founded BitMEX in or about 2014 (DOJ), and it operated from at least Nov 2014 (CFTC). On 13 May 2016 it launched XBTUSD, the first perpetual swap: a bitcoin future that never expires and is held near spot by funding payments ev

The rates and relative-value hedge-fund firm that Michael Platt and William Reeves founded in 2000 after leaving JPMorgan's proprietary trading desks, which grew to a reported peak of ~$37bn (May 2013), spun off its BlueTrend systematic business as Systematica (2014–15), handed back all outside money from 1 December 2015, and has since run only its partners' and employees' capital. It is this know

The global macro and rates firm that Alan Howard and four colleagues founded in 2002 after leaving Credit Suisse First Boston's proprietary trading desk, whose flagship Brevan Howard Master Fund (launched 1 Apr 2003) became Europe's best-known macro fund, peaked with the firm at ~$40bn (Oct 2013), shrank to a reported ~$6.3bn (2018) after years of near-flat returns, and rebuilt to ~$34bn (31 Dec 2

The Westport, Connecticut, macro manager that Ray Dalio started in 1975 as a research and hedging-advice shop and turned into the largest hedge fund firm in the world on two trading ideas that are now industry templates: separating alpha from beta (Pure Alpha, 1991), a diversified global-macro book that targets a fixed volatility and holds no persistent market exposure, and balancing risk across e

The Baltimore commodity trading advisor that Keith Campbell started on 1 Jan 1972, when he took over trading what became the Campbell Fund. The firm describes it as the oldest continuously operated private commodity pool in the US. Campbell is the institutional CTA: it turned a trend-following rule into a firm with a research department, a compliance function, broker-sold public futures funds and

The Paris quantitative manager that Jean-Pierre Aguilar founded in 1991 with a managed-futures programme (Discus), and that became a physics laboratory when it merged in 2000 with Science & Finance, the research firm the physicist Jean-Philippe Bouchaud had founded in 1994 (CFM). Its story turns on econophysics and published research: CFM publishes much of what it learns about markets — price impa

The Chicago exchange group that created the US listed options market on 26 Apr 1973 and has since designed most of the contracts that options and volatility traders use as their basic tools: index options on the S&P 100 and S&P 500 (1983), the VIX (announced 19 Jan 1993) and its futures (26 Mar 2004) and options (24 Feb 2006), the BXM and PUT strategy benchmarks (2002, 2007), weekly options (2005)

The incumbents' answer to app brokers. Charles Schwab built the US discount brokerage after fixed commissions ended on 1 May 1975; fifty years later, through the TD Ameritrade acquisition (announced 25 Nov 2019, closed 6 Oct 2020, ~$26bn in stock), it also owns thinkorswim, the options-and-futures platform that Tom Sosnoff and Scott Sheridan founded (1999, Wikipedia — per the tastytrade profile) a

The Richmond, Virginia commodity trading advisor that Jerry Parker, one of Richard Dennis's original Turtles, founded in February 1988 to run Turtle-style breakout trend following for clients — the clearest test of whether the rules taught in 1983–84 could become a durable business. The answer in the record is "yes, with long interruptions." Chesapeake's flagship had only two losing years in its f

The Miami-based multi-strategy hedge fund that Ken Griffin started in Chicago on 1 November 1990 with ~$4.6m, after trading convertible bonds from his Harvard dormitory in 1987; that nearly died in 2008 when its flagship Kensington and Wellington funds lost ~55% and it gated redemptions; and that rebuilt itself into the most profitable hedge-fund manager on record — ~$90.4bn of net gains for inves

The Miami-based market maker that Ken Griffin built out of his hedge fund's options market-making desk in 2002 and turned into the largest liquidity provider in US stocks and retail order flow — the wholesaler that fills a large share of American retail trades bought from brokers such as Robinhood, the largest NYSE designated market maker after it bought IMC's book (announced Oct 2020), a top opti

The Chicago exchange group that turned a butter-and-egg market into the world's largest futures venue and the toll road on most of the leverage traded in US rates, equity indices, oil, gold and grains. The Chicago Mercantile Exchange (the "Merc", 1898 as the Chicago Butter and Egg Board, renamed 1919) invented financial futures with currency contracts in 1972, launched S&P 500 futures in 1982, put

Coinbase's CFTC-regulated futures exchange — the main attempt to bring the crypto trader's favourite instrument, the leveraged perpetual, onshore into the US futures system. Coinbase bought the small Chicago exchange FairX (LMX Labs, LLC, a designated contract market since Nov 2020) in a deal announced on 12 Jan 2022, renamed it Coinbase Derivatives Exchange, and listed nano bitcoin futures (1/100

The New York quantitative pioneer that David E. Shaw, a former Columbia computer-science professor who had run technology for Nunzio Tartaglia's automated proprietary-trading group at Morgan Stanley, founded in 1988 to trade computational statistical arbitrage in equities — and that survived two near-fatal episodes (the 1998 fixed-income losses inside its leveraged alliance with BankAmerica, and t

The youngest of Amsterdam's options trading firms — a proprietary trading house incorporated on 23 Jul 2015 (Da Vinci Derivatives B.V., KvK 63796473) and "founded in 2015 by a group of traders" to trade derivatives with its own capital, "with a strong emphasis on volatility" (Euronext, 14 Sep 2017). It rang the Euronext Amsterdam gong for its exchange membership in September 2017, rebuilt its trad

The offshore exchange that made crypto options a real market. John Jansen, a former options market maker on the Amsterdam exchange, launched Deribit in the Netherlands in 2016 to list bitcoin options at a time when almost no venue did (founding month reported as June 2016 — verify). It listed European-style, cash-settled options quoted and margined in the coin itself, added futures and perpetuals,

The Chicago principal trading firm that Don Wilson founded in 1992 after trading short-term interest-rate options in the CME's Eurodollar pit — a firm that trades only its own money ("no outside investors", DRW website), calls itself at once "a liquidity provider, a risk taker, and a latency-sensitive trading firm", and has repeatedly bought what others were forced or unwilling to hold: three of t

The Stuart, Florida commodity trading advisor that physicist Bill Dunn founded in 1974 and that still runs, in its World Monetary and Agriculture (WMA) programme, what the firm describes as his original long-term trend-following algorithm — the purest and most volatile live test of trend following in this knowledge base. WMA has posted some of the largest gains any CTA reports — +51.46% in 2008 an

The Pittsburgh-born macro trader Stanley Druckenmiller (born 14 Jun 1953) and his firm, Duquesne Capital Management, which he started in 1980–81 with ~$1m of client accounts, ran alongside Dreyfus (1986–88) and George Soros's Quantum Fund (lead portfolio manager 1988–2000), and closed to outside money in Aug 2010 with about $12bn under management and a reported record of ~30% a year with no losing

The Israeli multi-asset retail platform, founded in Tel Aviv in 2007 as RetailFX by the brothers Yoni and Ronen Assia and David Ring, that turned retail FX and CFD trading into a social network and made copy trading its signature product: from 2010 its OpenBook platform let users mirror other users' trades automatically, and its patented CopyTrader and Popular Investor programme (leaders paid "a p

The Frankfurt derivatives exchange that proved a screen could beat a trading floor. Its predecessor, the all-electronic Deutsche Terminbörse (DTB), began trading on 26 Jan 1990 (Deutsche Börse company history). Between 1990 and 1998 it took the Euro-Bund future (on 10-year German government bonds) away from London's open-outcry LIFFE. It merged with the Swiss SOFFEX to form Eurex in 1998, then mad

Two exchanges whose histories merged, split and merged again. The London International Financial Futures Exchange (LIFFE) opened in the Royal Exchange on 30 Sep 1982, modelled on Chicago's pits. It grew into Europe's largest futures exchange by end-1996, then lost its flagship Bund future to Frankfurt's electronic DTB in 1997–98 and closed its last pits on 24 Nov 2000. Euronext was formed on 22 Se

The Amsterdam market maker in exchange-traded products (ETPs) that two former options traders, Roger Hodenius and Jan van Kuijk, founded in 2004 and listed on Euronext Amsterdam on 10 Jul 2015 at €32 a share — after Virtu Financial, the one sizeable electronic market maker whose economics are audited and public. Its annual reports are the best public record of what ETF market making earns and how

The Hong Kong online broker that Leaf Hua Li, a former Tencent employee, built from a Shenzhen software company (operations from Dec 2007) into a licensed Hong Kong securities dealer (Oct 2012), listed on Nasdaq on 8 Mar 2019 (7.5m ADSs at US$12.00, ~US$90m; Tencent bought 666,667 of them — prospectus), and then took overseas as moomoo, an app launched in the United States in 2018 and later in Sin

The New York retail foreign-exchange broker — founded in 1999 as Shalish Capital Markets by Drew Niv and partners, listed on the NYSE in December 2010 at $14 a share — that sold leveraged currency trading to individuals on the promise of a "No Dealing Desk" agency model, and was nearly destroyed in an afternoon when the Swiss National Bank removed its EUR/CHF 1.20 floor on 15 Jan 2015. Its clients

The London quantitative trading firm that Jonathan Hiscock, Deutsche Bank's former head of global statistical arbitrage, founded in 2005 with about 15 staff as a systematic long/short equity hedge fund (Wikipedia, citing GlobalCapital, Jan 2005). It never grew large — about $2.6–2.7bn of assets in 2021–22 (Bloomberg; Wikipedia) and $4.9bn of regulatory assets in mid-2026 (Form ADV) — but its UK pa

The Hangzhou quantitative fund manager (幻方量化, Huanfang Lianghua) that Liang Wenfeng and two Zhejiang University classmates built from an algorithmic-trading experiment begun in the 2008 crisis into China's largest quant hedge fund — ~RMB 100bn (~$15.7bn) by late 2021 (Reuters, Jan 2022; Bloomberg put it at ~RMB 90bn, ~$14.1bn, in Sep 2021) — and that then incubated the AI lab DeepSeek (2023). Its

The New York automated trading firm founded in 2002 by a small group of Harvard and MIT computer scientists and mathematicians, which built its business on fully automated US equity market making written as software rather than run by traders, grew to handle a share of US stock volume reported at more than 15% (2021), and by 2025 had become — on reported figures — one of the three largest market m

The Dallas oil heirs Nelson Bunker Hunt and William Herbert Hunt spent most of the 1970s buying silver: physical bullion and futures contracts on COMEX (New York) and the Chicago Board of Trade (CBOT). Their buying became the largest attempted corner of a US commodity market since the grain corners of the nineteenth century. The SEC staff's report, *The Silver Crisis of 1980* (Oct 1982), found tha

The London-listed retail trading group that Stuart Wheeler started in 1974 as IG Index ("Investors Gold Index") so that British clients could bet on the gold price at a time when UK exchange controls restricted buying physical gold (Wikipedia, citing the BBC, Reuters and the *Telegraph*). Out of that one bet came the UK's spread-betting industry and, later, a global business in contracts for diffe

The Amsterdam options market maker that two floor traders, Robert Defares and René Schelvis, started in 1989 on the Amsterdam Equity Options Exchange, and that grew into a global, technology-led liquidity provider with ~1,900 people and $3,120m of net trading revenue in 2025 (audited, IFRS; up 40% on $2,235m in 2024). IMC is private but publishes an annual report, which makes it — with Optiver, Fl

The New York volatility manager founded in 2014 by James Velissaris, formerly a portfolio manager at David Bonderman's family office Wildcat Capital (Institutional Investor, reported), which sold a "volatility alpha" strategy — OTC variance swaps, corridor variance swaps and other options-like positions — through a private fund (Infinity Q Volatility Alpha, >$1bn in mid-2020) and a daily-dealing m

The broker that began as an options market maker. Thomas Peterffy, a Hungarian-born programmer, bought an American Stock Exchange seat in 1977 and priced options with computer models when the trading floor still ran on intuition; his firm, Timber Hill (formed 1982), carried model-generated price sheets and then handheld computers onto the floor (reported, verify date) and became one of the first e

The New York proprietary trading firm that three former Susquehanna traders and an IBM programmer started in 1999–2000 to arbitrage ADRs and ETFs, and that by 2025 reportedly earned more net trading revenue than any Wall Street bank's markets division — a partnership with no CEO, a codebase written in OCaml, and a dominant position in ETF and bond-ETF market making and US options. Jane Street's st

The Tokyo-listed holding company formed on 1 Jan 2013 when the Tokyo Stock Exchange merged with the Osaka Securities Exchange. Its derivatives arm, Osaka Exchange (OSE), has held all of Japan's listed securities derivatives since 24 Mar 2014 and its commodity futures since 27 Jul 2020. Osaka claims a lineage back to the Dojima rice market, where trading began around 1697 and which the shogunate fo

The Boston-born speculator (1877–1940) who learned to trade in the bucket shops of the 1890s, became the best-known stock and commodity operator in the United States as the "Boy Plunger", won and lost several fortunes — a short sale before the October 1907 panic, a wipe-out in cotton in 1908, bankruptcy in 1915, a ~$10m wheat campaign in 1924–25, a reputed bear fortune in 1929, a fourth bankruptcy

The trend-following CTA that John W. Henry started in 1981 with a mechanical system he had first tested on his own money. Through Merrill Lynch, Smith Barney and Refco public futures funds it became one of the best-known names in managed futures. It managed ~$2.3bn of client assets at end-1998 (JWH Global Trust prospectus, 1999) and a reported peak of ~$2.5bn, dated to 2004 by one report and 2006

The 2012 trading loss in the Chief Investment Office (CIO) of JPMorgan Chase, the largest US bank, in which a London book of credit-default-swap index positions called the Synthetic Credit Portfolio (SCP) grew to a notional $157bn in the first quarter of 2012 and then lost at least $6.2bn (Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, report and release of 14 Mar 2013). The trader at the centre

The Chicago proprietary trading firm that two Deutsche Mark pit traders, Bill DiSomma and Paul Gurinas, founded in 1999 and turned into one of the fastest automated traders in futures, equities, FX and crypto. It trades only its own capital, has never published accounts and almost never gives interviews. Its story turns on speed as the edge — microwave towers across the Midwest and Europe, one of

The Boston-founded investment bank (1865), 80%-owned by General Electric from 1986, whose government-bond desk under Orlando Joseph Jett reported profits for two and a half years that its own accounting system had invented. Jett joined Kidder in July 1991 on the zero-coupon (STRIPS) desk at a $75,000 salary; by 1993 he ran the government desk, was paid a $9.3m bonus and was named Kidder's "Man of

The Jersey City wholesale market maker, founded in 1995, that built the largest US business in filling retail stock orders by paying brokers for them — and then, on the morning of 1 August 2012, lost more than $460m in about 45 minutes (SEC order, 16 Oct 2013; Knight's own early estimate was ~$440m pre-tax) when a partly deployed software release reactivated retired code on one of eight servers of

South Korea's single exchange group, formed in January 2005 by merging the Korea Stock Exchange, the KOSDAQ market and the Korea Futures Exchange. It runs the market for KOSPI 200 options, listed on 7 Jul 1997, which became the world's most traded derivatives contract: 3.67bn contracts in 2011, when no other contract in the world topped one billion (FIA annual survey, Mar 2012). The boom was built

The New York short-selling firm founded in 1985 by James (Jim) Chanos with $16m — $1m of the founders' money and $15m from one client (*Yale Alumni Magazine*, Sep/Oct 2013) — which became the best-known fundamental short seller in the world. Its record rests on finding companies whose reported earnings outran their economics: Baldwin-United (1982, before the firm existed), Enron (shorted from Nove

The Montana-born commodity trader, indicator inventor and trading author (born 6 Oct 1942) whose name is attached to the most quoted number in retail futures trading — 11,376% (the ending balance as a percentage of the start — the gain is ~11,276%; the organiser says "subject to final audit"), the return he reported in the 1987 World Cup Championship of Futures Trading run by Robbins Trading Compa

The California-born professional trader (born 1959, Pasadena) who started in 1981 as an equity-options market maker on the floor of the Pacific Coast Stock Exchange and then the Philadelphia Stock Exchange, registered as a commodity trading advisor (CTA) with the NFA in 1992 and founded LBRGroup, Inc., was interviewed in Jack Schwager's *The New Market Wizards* (1992), co-wrote *Street Smarts: Hig

The Chicago options manager, owned and run by Anthony Caine, that sold short-dated, out-of-the-money options on S&P 500 futures — mostly puts, some calls, partly hedged but net short — to private funds, separately managed accounts and, from January 2013, a retail mutual fund, the LJM Preservation and Growth Fund. Marketed as "risk centric" with a worst-case daily loss of 20% for the mutual fund an

The Greenwich, Connecticut hedge fund that John Meriwether founded in February 1994 with the core of his former Salomon Brothers bond-arbitrage group and two future Nobel laureates, Myron Scholes and Robert Merton. It earned ~43% in 1995 and ~41% in 1996 (Federal Reserve History; the President's Working Group report of April 1999 calls them "about 40 percent" net) by running small convergence spre

The Sydney-based, ASX-listed financial group whose Commodities and Global Markets (CGM) division became one of the world's largest bank-owned commodity traders, and in North American natural gas one of the largest physical marketers of any kind. Macquarie began as Hill Samuel Australia (opened 10 Dec 1969 with three staff), became Macquarie Bank under a banking authority signed in Feb 1985, listed

The New York short-volatility relative-value manager founded in 2013 by two former Goldman Sachs equity-derivatives professionals, Jacob (Jake) Weinig and Joseph (Joe) Aiken (Bloomberg calls them traders; Institutional Investor calls them "VP-level sales guys"), with a $25m seed from Global Endowment Management (II), which grew to ~$600m by selling equity-crash protection — in II's words, insuranc

The London-listed asset manager (LSE: EMG) whose systematic arm, Man AHL, is the original industrial-scale trend follower: founded as Adam, Harding & Lueck in 1987, majority-owned by ED&F Man from 1989 and wholly owned from 1994 (man.com), and today one of the largest CTA-style managers inside a group that reported $227.6bn of assets under management at the end of 2025 and $253.6bn at 30 June 2026

The self-taught US stock trader who won the stock division of the US Investing Championship in 1997 (+155%, on $250,000 of his own money) and the $1,000,000+ stock division in 2021 (+334.8%, then a contest record), was profiled in Jack Schwager's *Stock Market Wizards* (2001) with a reported ~220% a year over about five years, and codified his growth-stock method — SEPA ("specific entry point anal

The London long/short equity manager that Paul Marshall and Ian Wace founded in 1997 with US$50m (US$25m of it from George Soros, Wikipedia) and turned into one of Europe's largest hedge-fund firms by building TOPS, a system that collects stock ideas from sell-side brokers and turns them into portfolios. That made "alpha capture" a trading system. Assets went from ~US$15bn at the end of 2007 to ~U

The New York long/short equity hedge fund that Gabe Plotkin, one of Steven Cohen's best-known portfolio managers at SAC Capital, launched in late 2014 with about $200m from Point72 among its first capital, which compounded at roughly 30% a year through 2020 (press, reported), started 2021 with about $12.5bn (Bloomberg, reported) — and then became the most famous loser of the GameStop squeeze. Melv

The Frankfurt metals, mining and engineering conglomerate — Germany's 14th-largest corporation in 1993, with sales of over DM 26bn (~US$16bn) (Mello–Parsons, *Journal of Applied Corporate Finance* 8(1), Spring 1995) — whose US oil subsidiary, MG Refining & Marketing (MGRM), sold independent US fuel retailers fixed-price gasoline, heating-oil and jet-fuel supply for up to ten years and hedged the o

The New York multi-manager hedge fund that Israel ("Izzy") Englander founded in 1989 and turned into the archetype of the "pod shop": several hundred independent trading teams, each given capital, a risk budget and a hard drawdown stop, with the firm, not the portfolio manager, owning the aggregate book. Its story turns on the drawdown stop as a system. A PM who loses about 5% of allocated capital

The Mumbai exchange that brought screen-based trading to India in 1994, launched NIFTY index futures on 12 Jun 2000 and index options on 4 Jun 2001, and then built the largest options market in the world by number of contracts. It got there through very small, cheap, short-dated index options: BANKNIFTY weekly options from 27 May 2016 and NIFTY weeklies from Feb 2019. The Futures Industry Associat

The Hungarian-born ballroom dancer (1920–1977) who, by his own account and *Time*'s, made more than $2,000,000 trading US stocks by cable and telegram while touring nightclubs in 1957–59, wrote it up in *How I Made $2,000,000 in the Stock Market* (American Research Council, Larchmont, New York, 1960), and became the subject of the first New York Attorney General action under a broadened state law

The Chicago clearing house that stands behind every US listed equity, ETF and index option — the buyer to every seller and the seller to every buyer, whichever of the 18 US options exchanges the trade happened on. Founded in 1973 with the opening of listed options, OCC became the single clearing utility for a market that cleared 15,207,163,554 options contracts in 2025 (+24.4% from 12,224,227,606

The Tampa, Florida commodity trading advisor run by James Cordier, co-author of *The Complete Guide to Option Selling* (McGraw-Hill; 2004, 2009, 2014). It sold naked options on commodity futures for ~290 wealthy individual clients, many of them retirees, in managed accounts cleared by INTL FCStone (now StoneX). In the week ended 16 Nov 2018 natural gas spiked. Front-month NYMEX gas settled at $4.8

The Amsterdam options market maker founded on 9 Apr 1986 by Johann Kaemingk, Ruud Vlek and Chris Oomen as a market maker on the European Options Exchange (EOE), whose name comes from the Dutch *optieverhandelaar*, "option trader" (Wikipedia). Forty years later it is one of the few private market makers that publishes its group results. Its own releases give net trading income of €4.556bn and net p

The New York hedge-fund firm founded by John Paulson in 1994 as a small merger-arbitrage shop — with $2m and one employee in office space rented from Bear Stearns (Gregory Zuckerman's *The Greatest Trade Ever*, 2009, as cited by Wikipedia) — which made what is usually called the greatest trade in hedge-fund history: buying credit default swap (CDS) protection on subprime mortgage bonds in 2006–07

The Chicago options market maker — founded in 1997 by Matt Hulsizer and Jenny Just, two former O'Connor & Associates options traders, with ~$1.5m of seed money (Forbes, Oct 2021, via Wikipedia) — that used its trading profits to build other businesses rather than to become the biggest market maker. The firm's record is less a story about one edge than about turning a trading edge into businesses:

Steven A. Cohen's firm in two lives. SAC Capital Advisors (1992–2013) was the Stamford, Connecticut, equity hedge fund that charged up to 3% and 50% and reportedly returned about 30% a year net of fees by trading around information faster and harder than anyone else (Wikipedia, citing press). It ended with the largest insider-trading penalty in US history. SAC pleaded guilty in Nov 2013 to four co

The hedge fund that the mathematician Edward O. Thorp and the Princeton-trained investor James "Jay" Regan started in November 1969 as Convertible Hedge Associates — widely described, including by Thorp, as the first market-neutral quantitative hedge fund. It hedged warrants, convertibles and options against their stock with pricing models Thorp built before Black–Scholes was published, later ran

The London-based quantitative and systematic manager that began as the Qube Fund inside Credit Suisse in October 2016, left the bank through a management buyout led by Pierre-Yves Morlat (announced Aug 2017, independent from early 2018) with roughly $0.8–1bn, and grew to a reported ~$38bn of assets by January 2026 (Bloomberg, reported) — the fastest-growing new-generation quant firm of its era. Un

The East Setauket, Long Island, quantitative trading firm founded by the mathematician and former code-breaker Jim Simons, whose employee-owned Medallion fund holds the strongest trading record ever reported — ~66% a year gross of fees and ~39% net, 1988–2018 (arithmetic averages of annual returns, from Gregory Zuckerman's *The Man Who Solved the Market*, 2019; later reports extend the same percen

The Menlo Park app broker that Vlad Tenev and Baiju Bhatt founded in 2013. It launched commission-free US stock trading on phones in March 2015, added commission-free options in December 2017 (FINRA), and paid for both with payment for order flow (PFOF): wholesale market makers such as Citadel Securities and Susquehanna pay it for the right to fill customer orders. Options pay far more per trade t

In the 1980s Salomon Brothers' domestic fixed-income arbitrage group was the most profitable trading desk on Wall Street (Finance KB). John Meriwether built it, and it was staffed with finance PhDs who bought cheap bonds, sold expensive near-identical ones and waited for the gap to close, using Salomon's balance sheet. Its trades were Treasury relative value, the cash–futures basis, swap spreads a

The Copenhagen online trading bank that Lars Seier Christensen and Kim Fournais founded in 1992 as the broker Midas Fondsmæglerselskab, with about $80,000 of capital (Wikipedia). It launched an internet FX platform in 1997, became a licensed bank and took the name Saxo Bank in 2001, and built its business on one multi-asset platform (SaxoTrader, later SaxoTraderGO and SaxoTraderPRO) sold both to i

The California hedge fund founded in November 2000 by Michael Burry — a physician turned value investor who had built a following on internet message boards — which became the first well-known fund to buy credit default swap (CDS) protection on subprime mortgage bonds, starting with $60m from Deutsche Bank on 19 May 2005 (Michael Lewis, as cited by Wikipedia). The trade lost money and provoked an

The Paris bank whose junior trader on the Delta One desk, Jérôme Kerviel, hid directional index-futures positions of EUR 28bn (30 Jun 2007), EUR 30bn (31 Oct 2007) and finally EUR 49bn long (built 2–18 Jan 2008) behind fictitious offsetting trades. The bank found the January position on 18–20 Jan 2008 and closed it out on 21–23 Jan 2008, into one of the sharpest European sell-offs of the credit cr

The New York firm through which George Soros ran the Quantum Fund — the most famous global macro fund in history — from its roots in the offshore Double Eagle fund (1969) through Soros Fund Management (1973) and the Quantum name (1979), and which since July 2011 has been a family office managing the Soros family's and the Open Society Foundations' money rather than outsiders'. Its story turns on a

The systematic multi-strategy manager that traces its roots to nQuant, a proprietary trading unit founded inside Lehman Brothers in 2000. nQuant passed to Barclays with Lehman's North American business in 2008 and was spun out of Barclays as an independent firm on 15–16 Dec 2014 (Wikipedia; Preqin). It started with about 60 people (reported Aug 2014). By 2026 it had about 2,350 staff in 17 locatio

The copper team of Sumitomo Corporation, the Osaka- and Tokyo-based Japanese trading house, and its chief copper trader Yasuo Hamanaka, who hid trading losses from 1985 and then, with a New York merchant, cornered the London Metal Exchange (LME) copper market in 1995–96. The US Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) found that by 24 Nov 1995 Sumitomo "owned 93% of all LME warehouse stocks thr

The Bala Cynwyd, Pennsylvania options market maker that Jeff Yass, Arthur Dantchik and a group of card-playing friends from SUNY Binghamton founded in May 1987 above the Philadelphia Stock Exchange, built on the idea that trading is a game of decisions under uncertainty — taught to new hires partly through poker — and grew into one of the largest options and ETF market makers in the world, a top-t

The Japanese individual day trader, known online as "B・N・F", who began trading Japanese shares in 2000 with about ¥1.6m (~US$15,000 at ~¥108/$, approximate) and became nationally known on 8 Dec 2005, when a Mizuho Securities employee entered an order to sell 610,000 shares of J-Com at ¥1 instead of one share at ¥610,000 — 42 times the company's 14,500 shares outstanding. Kotegawa bought 7,100 shar

The Chicago options-and-futures brokerage and financial-video network built by Tom Sosnoff and partners after they sold their first options broker, thinkorswim, to TD Ameritrade (announced 8 Jan 2009 at ~$606m). tastytrade began as a live online network in 2011, opened its own brokerage, tastyworks, in 2017, and was bought by the London-listed IG Group for $1.0bn ($300m cash and 61.0m IG shares; a

The crypto hedge fund that Su Zhu and Kyle Davies, two former Credit Suisse traders, started as a small trading firm (the fund company was incorporated in the British Virgin Islands on 3 May 2012 — liquidator's declaration) and ran from Singapore, where its manager was registered with the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) from August 2013 with a cap of S$250m under management (MAS, 30 Jun 2022

The New York high-frequency trading firm that Mark Gorton and Alistair Brown founded in February 1998 and built into a multi-asset automated trader connected to more than 150 venues — the training ground, reportedly, of Hudson River Trading's founders, and the firm whose enforcement record shows the compliance bill for misconduct inside a speed business. Its affiliate Latour Trading paid a record

The Stamford, Connecticut, macro firm that Paul Tudor Jones founded in November 1980 after learning to trade cotton futures, which made its name by profiting from the stock-market crash of 19 Oct 1987 — +125.9% after fees in 1987 in his main fund (NYT via CNBC, Mar 2014; other sources give 62% in October and ~200% for the year, which may refer to a different vehicle — see below) — and the Japanese

The trading experiment that Chicago futures trader Richard Dennis and his partner William Eckhardt ran from December 1983: two classes of novices — 21 men and two women in most accounts — recruited through newspaper advertisements, taught a mechanical breakout trend-following system in about two weeks and given accounts of Dennis's own money, to settle an argument over whether trading could be tau

The New York quantitative manager that John Overdeck and David Siegel — both from D. E. Shaw — founded with Mark Pickard in 2001, with seed money from Paul Tudor Jones, to run trading as a data-science and engineering problem: thousands of machine-learning forecasts from market and alternative data, combined by a central optimiser. It grew from ~$8bn (Nov 2011) to ~$60bn (May 2019) and ~$70bn (202

The Beijing quantitative fund manager (九坤投资, Jiukun Investment) founded in April 2012 by Wang Chen and Yao Qicong — returnees from US quant firms (Millennium per 36Kr; WorldQuant per Wikipedia's sources) who came back to China to trade the new stock-index futures. It grew from a proprietary futures trader into one of China's "big four" quant managers, with ~$8bn (~RMB 52bn) in September 2021 (Bloo

The Swiss bank whose London Exchange Traded Funds desk — part of the newly formed Global Synthetic Equities (GSE) division — lost $2.3bn on unauthorised trading by one trader, Kweku Adoboli, discovered on 14 September 2011 (FSA Final Notice to UBS AG, 25 Nov 2012; FINMA, 26 Nov 2012). The losses came "primarily on exchange traded index future positions" — S&P 500, DAX and Euro Stoxx futures over t

The Miami-based tail-hedging fund founded in January 2007 by the former Chicago pit trader Mark Spitznagel, with the *Black Swan* author Nassim Nicholas Taleb as scientific adviser, which buys far out-of-the-money equity-index puts so that a small allocation pays off hugely in a crash. Its reported results are the most famous convex payoffs in modern markets — returns "over 100%" in 2008 (Wikipedi

The New York electronic market maker that Vincent Viola, a former NYMEX chairman, founded in 2008 with Douglas Cifu, and that became the one large US high-frequency market maker whose economics are audited and public — the rare evidence in a business where Citadel Securities, Jane Street and HRT disclose nothing. Its March 2014 IPO filing showed only one losing trading day in 1,238 (Jan 2009–Dec 2

William J. O'Neil (25 Mar 1933 – 28 May 2023) was a Los Angeles stockbroker who studied past stock-market winners with early computers, founded the research and brokerage firm William O'Neil + Co. (1963), bought a New York Stock Exchange seat at 30 (1964 per Bloomberg), launched *Investor's Daily* (9 Apr 1984; *Investor's Business Daily* from Sep 1991), and codified the CAN SLIM growth-momentum me

A London crypto market maker — Wintermute Trading Ltd, incorporated on 25 Jul 2017 (Companies House 10882520) by Evgeny Gaevoy, who spent nearly a decade at Optiver running its European ETF business, with co-founders Harro Mantel and Yoann Turpin (MarketsWiki; The Block, Jan 2021). It quotes two-sided prices in spot, perpetuals and options on centralised exchanges, supplies liquidity to on-chain a

The London quantitative manager that David Harding founded in 1997 after leaving AHL, which grew from $1.6m at launch to $33.8bn of assets under advisement at the end of 2015 — one of the largest trend-following businesses in the world — and then did what no other large CTA did: it decided trend following was "working less well than over the preceding four decades" (Harding, Winton Group annual re

A privately held Chicago options market maker founded in 1994 that started in equity-index options and grew into a proprietary trading group "market making and valuation arbitrage across global markets", with two sister businesses under Wolverine Holdings — an agency broker-dealer (Wolverine Execution Services) and a hedge-fund manager (Wolverine Asset Management, whose flagship began as a convert

XIV — the *VelocityShares Daily Inverse VIX Short-Term ETN* — was an unsecured note issued by Credit Suisse AG (Nassau Branch), created in 2010 with VelocityShares (later part of Janus), that paid the daily inverse of an index of first- and second-month VIX futures. It turned the variance risk premium and the VIX futures roll into a stock-like ticker that retail investors could buy in any brokerag

The London electronic market maker that Alex Gerko, a Moscow-trained mathematician who had worked at Deutsche Bank and the quant fund GSA Capital, founded in January 2015 and built into one of the world's largest non-bank liquidity providers with no human traders in the loop — machine-learning price forecasts on over 53,000 instruments, about 300 employees, a 25,000-GPU research cluster and a €1bn

The Bengaluru discount broker that Nithin Kamath bootstrapped in 2010 ("We kick-started operations on the 15th of August, 2010" — Zerodha's About page) with a flat ₹20 per executed order, then made equity delivery free in 2015 and became India's largest broker by NSE active clients in early 2019 (~8.47 lakh active clients vs ICICI Securities' ~8.44 lakh, NSE data as reported by YourStory, Jan 2019