We are pleased to announce that the 6th Annual Global Volatility Summit Tokyo will be taking place on March 26th, 2025 at the Mandarin Oriental Tokyo. For more information on next year’s event, please feel free to reach out to [email protected].
William Bartlett is Parallax Volatility Advisers’ CEO. Will has been involved with equity options since 1995 and has been with Parallax since 1996. In his more than 25 years at Parallax, he has played an active role transforming the firm from a small, floor-based equity options trading operation into a large participant in the global volatility market. Prior to joining Parallax, Will worked on the floor of the Pacific Coast Exchange while earning his Bachelor’s degree in Economics at the University of California, Berkeley. Will proudly serves on the Board of Trustees for both The Hamlin School and San Francisco University High School, The Board of Governors for Boys & Girls Clubs of San Francisco, and is a Senior Member of The Guardsmen, an organization helping at-risk youth by providing scholarships, support, and outdoor education programs to students in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Paul Britton is the Chief Executive Officer of Capstone, one of the leading firms in derivatives and complementary strategies, which he founded in 2004. Headquartered in New York with 11 offices globally, Paul formed Capstone to offer investors access to, and exploit the inefficiencies present in, complex derivatives markets, creating value for the firm’s clients, team, and industry over two decades of growth.
Paul’s philosophy of constant evolution and the firm’s store of unmatched talent are the twin pillars of Capstone’s success. The firm’s emphasis on enduring relationships with investors at all tiers, technology, analytics, and innovation, are priorities that Paul has developed and brought through to the present day. His career began in the pit with Saratoga Limited, where Paul traded options on the London International Financial Futures and Options Exchange (LIFFE) before co-founding Mako Global Derivatives
in 1999.
Paul currently serves on the Boards of the US Soccer Foundation, Friends Seminary School in New York City, and The Tate America’s Foundation. Paul was named an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) for his dedication and notable philanthropic contributions to the Tate Americas Foundation.
Paul received a BA in European Business Finance from London Metropolitan University.
Mr. Tobias Hekster, Co-Chief Investment Officer of True Partner Capital USA in Chicago, has been actively trading for the past 25 years in various different roles in several markets across the globe. Starting at IMC in 1998 as a pit trader in Amsterdam, Tobias has established the off-floor arbitrage desk, headed the Chicago office in the transition from floor trading to electronic trading and set up the Asian volatility arbitrage desk in Hong Kong. Tobias holds an MSc in Economics and has taught as an Adjunct Associate Professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong and as an Adjunct Professor of Financial Practice at National Taiwan University.
Stéphane Martin is Head of Derivatives Institutional Sales for Optiver in the APAC region. The Institutional Sales and Trading team leverages Optiver’s market-leading position and understanding of regional equity volatility markets to provide world class risk facilitation and solutions to global institutional counterparties such as hedge funds, asset managers and structured product issuers. Stéphane joined Optiver in 2018 having previously been Head of Institutional Sales for Vantage Capital Markets, specialising in commodity and equity derivatives, moving to Hong Kong from London in 2014. Stéphane holds a First Class (Honours) Bachelor of Science in Management and Strategy and a Master of Science in Investment Analysis from Aston Business School.
Razvan joined Aspect Capital in July 2010 and is Director of Investment Solutions. Razvan is a member of Aspect’s Product Design Group and attends Investment Committee meetings. Razvan and his team are an integral part of the product development and research functions at Aspect and they provide quantitative expertise to Aspect’s clients on investment process and the development of new product ideas. Razvan’s primary responsibility is client engagement on matters relating to strategies, products, performance and research. Prior to Aspect, Razvan worked at Skybound Capital, Clear Horizon Capital, and PeregrineQuant (now Vunani Fund Managers) in various quantitative research roles. He graduated with distinctions in Mathematics, Applied Mathematics and Physics from Rhodes University. He holds a BSc (Hons) in Theoretical Physics from Wits University and was awarded an MSc in Financial Mathematics from the University of Cape Town and is a CFA Charter holder.
Dan Stone is one of the co-founders of Ionic, where he focuses on managing the interest rates, currencies, and credit strategies. He has over 28 years of experience managing long volatility and relative value arbitrage strategies across multiple asset classes. Mr. Stone was formerly a Managing Director and Portfolio Manager in the U.S. and European Volatility and Credit Arbitrage Group at Highbridge. He joined Highbridge in 1996 where he managed convertible bonds and equity, interest rate and credit derivatives. Mr. Stone earned an AB in Economics Magna cum Laude from Harvard College.
Ionic Capital Management® LLC (“Ionic”) is a $3.9 billion New York based alternative asset manager founded in 2006 by Bart Baum and Daniel Stone. Ionic manages multiple private investment vehicles employing different investment strategies including relative value arbitrage, long volatility, and value equity. In addition, Ionic acts as sub-advisor to multiple registered investment funds for which it employs relative value arbitrage and value equity investment strategies. Within the long volatility investment strategies, Ionic focuses on generating negatively correlated returns, with the potential to deliver outsized returns in volatile markets. Ionic utilizes both explicit and imbedded options across asset classes, including equities, interest rates, currencies, commodities and credit in order to construct a portfolio that is typically positive convexity and long volatility.
Parallax Volatility Advisers, L.P. is the San Francisco based investment adviser to Parallax Master Fund, L.P. and Cega RV Master Fund, L.P. Parallax has four distinct investment strategies that align with our data-driven approach to capturing value through volatility and market dislocation by integrating robust quantitative models and embedded risk modeling with state-of-the-art technology.
Parallax Master Fund employs a global volatility relative value strategy that incorporates multiple trading strategies being utilized opportunistically. The process identifies trading opportunities by options flow analysis that is supported by qualitative and quantitative evaluation and targets the most attractive risk-adjusted portfolio of volatility exposures in both listed and over-the-counter options on global equities, indexes, ETFs, and commodities. Parallax was founded in 1996 and has been negatively correlated to major market indexes.
True Partner Capital is a global asset management firm founded by a team of former options market makers and technology specialists, invests on behalf of a varied global investor base and has a primary focus on equity volatility strategies. The Firm has offices in the US, Europe and Asia and the key personnel have been working together for well over a decade.
Our investment expertise is accessible via commingled funds, separate mandates and customized solutions where we offer tailored volatility solutions, for example for tail risk hedging. The Firm’s longest running commingled fund has an over 13-year track record pursuing the Firm’s relative value volatility strategy. The Firm trades close to 24 hours a day across liquid global derivative markets and leverages proprietary technology developed by our experienced team, enabling the portfolio management team to identify and capitalize on trading opportunities.
Harold is the architect of Transtrend’s Diversified Trend Program, responsible for R&D, portfolio management and trading. Harold was born and raised on a dairy farm in Drenthe. And from a young age, he has been intrigued by linking mathematics to the real world around us.
He graduated in 1990 with a Master’s degree in Applied Mathematics from the University of Twente in the Netherlands. In the final phase of his studies, while working on the project that would later become Transtrend, he became fascinated by the concept of leptokurtosis — or ‘fat tails’ — in probability distributions, a topic which has inspired him throughout his career.
Harold’s approach to markets is best described as a combination of a farmer’s common sense and mathematics, never losing sight of the underlying fundamentals.
