Managing Partner & Mentor

Raj Malhotra

I make options make sense — through real trades, not Greek letters.

Biography

Raj spent thirteen years as a professional equity options trader. A graduate of the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania with a Bachelor of Science in Economics, he began his career at BNP Securities in Philadelphia with the BNP Cooper Neff hedge fund before being moved to New York to trade the S&P 500 Index options book — at the time the most heavily traded options in the world. In 2002, Bank of America Securities recruited him away, where he rose to Head of Institutional Options Trading, covering the world’s largest hedge funds, and was promoted to Managing Director before the age of 30. He joined Nomura Securities in 2009 to help spearhead its U.S. business rollout, retiring at the end of 2011. Since 2012, Raj has mentored traders, managed capital for high-net-worth clients, and invested his own capital, turning institutional experience into a repeatable edge for individual traders.

Why I teach

I spent thirteen years on institutional options desks, and almost none of what actually made me money came from a textbook — it came from watching how markets behave when real capital is at risk. Most retail options education gets this backwards: it front-loads the Greeks and sells a playbook, when the thing that actually separates traders is judgment. Judgment can be taught — not by handing someone rules to follow, but by working through enough real situations that they stop looking for the rule and start reading the market.