An absolute-return volatility firm for a select group of families and individuals — access to specialist managers most investors can’t reach, assembled into one product built to preserve capital, move on its own, and turn turbulence into opportunity.
One product, assembled from specialist managers most investors will never reach.
Our equity-volatility managers are capacity-constrained, sourced through relationships rather than databases, and many are already closed to new money. We’ve spent decades inside that world, and we built Zero Delta to give families and individuals a seat in it — with a substantial portion of our own net worth invested right alongside theirs.
Declines far shallower than the market’s, gentle down months, and surprises that have leaned to the upside.
Zero Delta doesn’t track the stock market. When your business, real estate, and equities all fall together, it’s built to hold up while they do.
Zero Delta does its best work in the market’s worst months — holding up through the volatility spikes and the collapses that follow.
Disciplined relative value, position by position. If the price isn’t wrong, we don’t trade — only playing when we have the edge.
The giant multi-strategy firms run volatility books too. Two things keep them out of reach for almost everyone: you can’t get into them, and even if you could, they manage so much capital that they’re forced into the biggest, most liquid trades — index volatility, dispersion, the mega-caps. The granular, single-name mispricings our managers live on are simply too small to move a multi-billion-dollar book.
That’s not a limitation. It’s the whole point.
The day a strategy can hold a billion dollars, the edge is already gone.
We’re not competing with the giants — we’re working the opportunities they’re too big to bother with, alongside breakaway managers who left the giants to do exactly that.
We find them through a 40-year network of traders, technologists, and service providers — not a database. We evaluate them the way only former derivatives portfolio managers can: by taking their books apart, understanding why the inefficiency exists, and pressure-testing what could go wrong before a dollar goes in. And we only allocate where there’s a real, repeatable edge.
No edge, no allocationOur managers chose this life on purpose. They had the offers everyone chases — seats at the big multi-strategy platforms, careers at the prop firms — and walked away to compound their own capital, trade with autonomy, and let family and friends invest alongside them. They’re here to trade well, not to gather assets and collect fees. We’ve traded next to many of them for years, and a large share of our own net worth is invested right beside yours.
We also think real risk management looks different than the industry pretends. The firms most fixated on watching every position in real time still suffer catastrophic losses — because seeing a position isn’t the same as understanding it. Real control comes from knowing the trade, knowing the manager, and knowing exactly how the rare, extreme outcomes are handled before they happen. We’ve spent careers learning that difference.
We don’t bet on the market going up or down. Our positions profit from relationships getting out of line and snapping back — not from direction. That’s what “zero delta” means: no reliance on the market cooperating. It’s why our returns move on their own.
Protecting capital comes before chasing return — always. We cap how much rides on any single manager, weight their liquidity terms as heavily as their edge, and never go large on anyone we don’t know cold. And when we’re losing, we don’t press our “best” trades — we shrink everything and wait until we’re back in sync. Humility is a risk control.
We’re not asset gatherers, and we’re not smarter than the market. We size to the opportunity, scale back without ego when the edge fades, and stay small enough to be nimble. If there’s nothing worth doing, we do nothing.
Think of it as disciplined card counting.
Options on a single stock — and across baskets of related stocks — are priced against each other all day long. Most of the time those prices are fair. But the market is full of price-insensitive participants: index funds, ETFs, momentum chasers, and mechanical over-writers who transact no matter the price. That carelessness knocks prices out of line. That’s the opening.
Our managers wait for those dislocations — two things that should track each other have drifted apart, and history says they tend to snap back. They buy the cheap side, sell the rich side, and wait for the relationship to normalize. Relative value and mean reversion, one position at a time, across anywhere from dozens to a couple thousand small positions at once. No single trade is a wager on the market’s direction, and no single mistake can sink the book.
Two things make the strategy convex rather than fragile. We carry a long-vol bias — so where reckless funds sell options for income and break when markets move, we’re generally positioned to benefit. And we stay disciplined on price: if it isn’t wrong, we don’t trade. When markets turn chaotic, related options fall further out of line — so the harder it becomes for everyone else to know what anything is worth, the larger our opportunity set grows.
And here’s the part most people miss: we don’t win by being right more often than everyone else — we’re not. We win because our winners are far larger than our losers; we structure trades to risk a little and make a lot. We don’t need to be right often. We need to be paid well when we are.
Positioned to benefit when markets move, not break.
If there’s no edge, we simply don’t trade.
When prices stop making sense to others, our opportunity set is at its best.
The common thread: we’re the professional card counters, only playing when we have the edge.
Three principals, one core competency — two former equity-derivatives PMs alongside a derivatives-brokerage veteran, with 40-plus years inside proprietary trading firms, hedge funds, and brokerages and their own capital invested alongside yours.