In 2002, Mr. Karsan left his post at RBC to work under renowned Wall Street investor John Mulheren at Bear Wagner Specialists, where he helped expand the firm’s fledgling derivatives arbitrage arm into a competitive force within the industry. At the peak of Mr. Karsan’s tenure heading the Volatility Arbitrage Group for Bear Wagner, he managed a sizable team of employees and utilized a significant portion of the firm’s tradable capital. During this period, Mr. Karsan recruited and trained many investment professionals, several of whom are currently leaders in the industry.
In 2005, as Bear Wagner’s declining specialist operations put the firm’s viability at risk, Mr. Karsan took a portion of the trading arm he managed and founded a proprietary market-making firm specializing in equity index volatility arbitrage. From 2007 to 2010, over the course of the financial crisis, his firm, Precision Capital Management, earned a compounded return to investors of many multiples of their initial investment. With its success, the firm quickly became a significant player in the products it traded, constituting approximately 13-percent of CBOE S&P 500 index option volume at its peak. In 2010, as the CBOE began to aggressively pursue electronic trading for index products, Mr. Karsan departed from market making to apply his expertise in the asset management arena by founding Aegea Capital Management, LLC.
Over the course of the ensuing years, Mr. Downing developed and honed skills as a derivatives trader, risk manager, and entrepreneur at both the CME and the CBOT. He has demonstrated success with small and large proprietary trading firms, and has started his own proprietary groups and assisted larger firms such as Optiver in establishing their Eurodollar options desk. He is excited to bring his extensive trading and operational knowledge to Aegea Capital Management.