Cem Karsan is founder and senior managing partner of Kai Volatility Advisors. He is responsible for firm-wide management, as well as being head of research and risk management. Cem formed Kai Volatility Advisors after over a decade of experience building industry-leading derivatives businesses. From 1999 to 2002, he worked as a volatility trader as part of RBC Dominion Securities’ Derivatives Arbitrage Group. From 2002 to 2005, he worked under renowned Wall Street investor John Mulheren at Bear Wagner Specialists, where he helped expand the firm’s fledgling derivatives arbitrage business into a competitive force within the industry. In 2005, Cem took a select group from the firm’s trading arm and founded his own proprietary market-making firm specializing in equity index volatility arbitrage. From 2007 to 2010, over the course of the financial crisis, Precision Capital Management earned a compounded return to investors of many multiples of their initial investment. With its success, the firm quickly grew in the products it traded, accounting for approximately 13% of Cboe S&P 500 index option volume at its peak. In 2010, Cem divested his stake in Precision Capital to found KAI Volatility Advisors.
Kai Volatility Advisors Capital focuses on several equity-focused relative-value long volatility and tail hedge funds and specializes in proprietary analysis on directional flow indicators in the volatility space and exploiting their informational asymmetry to enhance trend-following strategies.
Cem holds a Bachelor of Arts from Rice University, with a triple major in economics, policy studies and english literature. He also holds an MBA from Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management, with an emphasis in analytical finance and management and strategy.
