Jeff Yass started young, and he started losing. When Schwager asked him in The New Market Wizards how he first got interested in markets, Yass answered directly: “When I was a kid. I loved the stock market. I used to tear the paper out of my father’s hands to check the stock quotes. The first time I tried a Swanson’s TV dinner, I thought it was so delicious and such a great idea that I wanted to buy the stock. I found out that Swanson’s was owned by Campbell, and I got my father to buy ten shares of stock for me. I was eleven at the time. The stock never went anywhere. When I was thirteen, I bought Eastern Airlines and a realty company that eventually went bankrupt. I always lost. In high school, I discovered options.”
That sequence, the early obsession with markets, the early losses, the discovery of options as a framework for thinking about probability rather than prediction, is the origin story of one of the most consequential trading firms in modern finance. Yass co-founded Susquehanna International Group in 1987 with a handful of college friends. By 2020, the firm was trading approximately 1.8 billion stock options contracts annually, accounting for nearly a quarter of all options trades in the United States. His net worth is estimated at approximately $30 billion.
From Poker Tables to the Philadelphia Exchange
Yass grew up in Bayside, Queens, the son of an accountant who ran a financial information company called Datatab. His father taught him about warrants and options, and they studied financial news together. By the time Yass enrolled at SUNY Binghamton to study mathematics and economics, he had already made his first trade, buying options in Alcoa after running the probability calculations and showing his father the edge.
At Binghamton he found a group of like-minded friends, middle-class kids from Queens and Brooklyn who shared his analytical orientation and his appetite for finding edge wherever it existed. They skipped class to bet at the racetrack. They played poker seriously, not as recreation but as applied probability theory. Yass later joked that he majored in poker. He even wrote an academic paper called “An Econometric Analysis of Horse Racing,” published in Gambling Times, summarizing what he had learned about probability and pricing in betting markets.
After graduation, Yass and his friends pooled resources and moved to Las Vegas to test their poker skills professionally. It was a hard education. The lessons learned at those tables, about position, about managing variance, about never being the least informed player in a game, became the intellectual foundation of Susquehanna’s trading philosophy. He returned east, where Israel Englander offered to back him for a seat on the Philadelphia Stock Exchange in 1981. That seat cost $30,000 with a 50 percent revenue share. He was reportedly the youngest trader there ever to make a million dollars in a year.
Susquehanna: Poker as a Training System
When Yass co-founded Susquehanna in 1987 with his Binghamton friends, the firm opened with $30 million in its first year. What distinguished it from other options operations was not just the mathematics. It was the explicit recognition that trading and poker are the same discipline applied to different domains. Both require making repeated decisions under uncertainty, managing the size of your bets relative to your edge, avoiding the trap of being the least-informed participant, and never confusing a good outcome with a good decision.
Susquehanna institutionalized that philosophy through its three-month training program for new hires, which placed poker games alongside simulated trading as equal components of the curriculum. Yass and his partners studied the hands that new traders played, looking specifically for anchoring bias, the tendency to peg decisions to a prior irrelevant reference point, and availability bias, the gambler’s fallacy of failing to equally weight new information. A reckless poker player was a reckless trader. The correlation was reliable enough to use as a filter.
Yass’s primary trading rule articulates the core of this thinking: “All of sports betting, all of playing poker, and all of options trading is making sure you’re betting against someone you’re smarter than. If you’re not asking yourself, am I the sucker, then you get arrogant and you get crushed.” That formulation maps directly onto the structural logic of trend following. The Turtle system worked because it exploited the behavioral biases of discretionary participants who held losers too long and exited winners too early. Ed Seykota described markets as a zero-sum game where sustainable edge requires being right when others are wrong. Yass arrived at the same conclusion through options pricing and game theory.
The Mathematics of Options and the Edge in Pricing
Schwager titled Yass’s chapter in The New Market Wizards “The Mathematics of Strategy,” and that framing captures what distinguished him from most options traders of his era. Where others focused on directional bets, Yass built an operation around identifying and exploiting mispricings in volatility, finding situations where the market was systematically pricing options incorrectly and positioning to capture the difference.
That approach required infrastructure, quantitative models, deep market data, and the ability to act on signals faster than competitors. It also required the discipline to hold positions only where the mathematical edge was genuine, which meant refusing to trade in situations where the firm’s edge over counterparties was unclear. The institutional commitment to edge identification over opportunity volume is the options world’s equivalent of the Turtle discipline of waiting for the right signal rather than trading out of boredom or impatience.
By 2020, Susquehanna had grown to command roughly 10 percent of market-making volume in exchange-traded funds, moving over 130 million shares daily across 50 countries. The firm also became a significant venture capital investor, with early stakes in ByteDance and dozens of other technology companies. It built its sports betting operation through a Dublin-based unit called Nellie Analytics, applying the same probability and pricing frameworks to a new domain. The underlying discipline, find a market where you have an informational or analytical edge, size the bets correctly, and execute consistently, is recognizably the same whether the instrument is a futures contract, an options spread, or a sports line.
Frequently Asked Questions
Who is Jeff Yass?
Jeff Yass is the co-founder and managing director of Susquehanna International Group, one of the largest options trading and market-making firms in the world. He grew up in Queens, New York, studied mathematics and economics at SUNY Binghamton, and co-founded Susquehanna in 1987 with college friends after developing his trading philosophy through professional poker and horse race betting. He was profiled in Jack Schwager’s The New Market Wizards under the chapter title “The Mathematics of Strategy.”
What is Susquehanna International Group?
Susquehanna International Group is a Philadelphia-based trading and investment firm co-founded by Yass and his partners in 1987. It is among the largest options traders and market makers in the United States, trading across stocks, ETFs, futures, and options globally. The firm is also a significant venture capital investor, with early stakes in companies including ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok.
How does poker connect to Susquehanna’s trading philosophy?
Yass and his partners viewed poker and trading as the same discipline applied to different domains: both require repeated decisions under uncertainty, correct bet sizing relative to edge, and the discipline to avoid situations where you are the least-informed participant. Susquehanna institutionalized this connection through its three-month training program, where poker games were a formal component of trader education, used to identify behavioral biases like anchoring and the gambler’s fallacy before they appeared on the trading floor.
Why does Jeff Yass appear on a trend following site?
Yass’s methodology is options-based and quantitative rather than systematic trend following, but the underlying principles converge at the most important points. Finding and exploiting a structural edge. Sizing bets relative to that edge rather than to conviction or emotion. Never being the least-informed participant in a trade. Accepting losses when the edge is not present and letting profitable positions reflect the actual probability advantage. Those are the same principles that drive the Turtle system and every serious systematic trading operation.
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