Our Team | Aegea Capital

Cem KarsanCem Karsan is Founder and Senior Managing Partner of Aegea Capital Management, LLC, as well as its Head of Research and Risk Management.

Mr. Karsan graduated with honors from Rice University in 1999 with a triple major in Economics, Public Policy, and English. He later graduated from Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management in 2006 with an MBA with emphasis in Analytical Finance and Management. Following his undergraduate studies, he worked as a volatility trader as part of RBC Dominion Securities’ Derivatives Arbitrage Group.

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.

Matt SchoenMatt Schoen joined Aegea Capital Management, LLC, in April of 2016 as a Senior Quantitative Analyst.

Mr. Schoen’s professional background has given him 17 years of experience as a Capital Market Specialist as well as leading large project management teams. From 2000 to 2006, he worked as a senior trader and risk manager for the options market making firm Wolverine on and off the CBOE floor. During his tenure, Mr. Schoen traded Equity, Index, and ETF options as a manager of multiple large sector volatility correlation books. In 2006, Mr. Schoen established a start-up equity derivatives trading company Think Tank Trading. As remote market maker, the company electronically executed complex non-directional option trading strategies and built in-house pricing models for the C++ black box quoting system.

Mr. Schoen served as the technical lead for a team of 10 programmers at various levels to build the front and back end options execution and risk platform. Additionally, Mr. Schoen traded equity volatility arbitrage strategies for Peak6 Investments from 2011 to 2015 and achieved excess returns while managing books consisting of 300 to 800 unique equity symbols. Mr. Schoen holds a degree in Business Management from Purdue University’s Krannert School of Management in West Lafayette, IN.