Michael Khouw
Michael Khouw, a 25+ year Wall Street veteran, is a Co-Founder and Managing Member of OpenInterest.PRO, a financial data, analysis and investment strategy consulting firm. Mike is also the co-author of “The Options Edge” (Wiley, 2016) a comprehensive guide to understanding the value of options, optionality, volatility and strategy for both institutional and self-directed investors and an advisor to OptionsPlay, LLC a visual, intuitive and educational platform offering options analysis and trading support to institutional and individual options market traders.
"​​Mike is passionate about his work, continually giving fantastic market insight that is hard to find from other media sources. His risk/reward recommendations in option trading makes investing a whole lot safer, debunking myths that option trading is a risky form of investing."
- Brian Stutland
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Michael's Story
Mike began his career at Gateway Partners in the 1990s as a floor-based options trader, market-maker and specialist on the Philadelphia Stock Exchange, and later at the American Stock Exchange. Gateway Partners, using proprietary options models and trading software, was one of the first exchange floor-based options market-making firms to deploy linked wireless handhelds enabling real-time, inter-underlying statistical volatility arbitrage. Mike led Gateway Partners' fee per contract arrangements with order-flow providers (aka "Payment for Order Flow") beginning in early 2000, one of the first 4 options firms to do so. Shortly after Gateway Partners was acquired by Knight Capital Markets in late 2001, Mike joined Bluefin, a New York based proprietary trading firm active in Equities, ETFs, Options/Futures, Commodities, Fixed Income and Foreign Exchange in markets around the globe. As a floor-trader on the open outcry pits of the New York Mercantile Exchange, Mike, along with other colleagues also formerly of Gateway Partners, started Bluefin's WTI Crude Oil and Henry Hub Natural Gas futures options trading business.
After a brief stint as a financial analyst at Ivory Capital in Los Angeles, a multi-billion AUM deep-dive, fundamental long/short hedge fund, in 2006 Mike joined Cantor Fitzgerald as a director, and later partner and head of the US Institutional Listed Equity/Index Options trading. In 2012 he joined CRT Capital, LLC as Managing Director and Head of Equity/Index Options Sales and Trading before being recruited by Scott Goldfarb, the Founder and CEO of Chicago based, Dash Financial which was deploying cutting edge trading algorithms with a philosophy focused on real-time transparency, particularly in the area of arcane exchange-fees and payment for order-flow, an area where Mike was one of the earliest market participants.
For 10 years Mike served as Chief Strategist for Tradelegs, LLC and its affiliate Optimize Advisors which developed pioneering Options AI combining Search Optimization and Deep Learning which leverages specialized algorithm hybridization infrastructure and power cluster-compute processing to address problems not solvable by conventional AI search or machine learning. Investment strategies developed at the firm tracked live since late 2018 have validated the approach, delivering returns with higher returns and lower drawdowns than the underlying benchmark.
In his current role as Chief Strategist of OpenInterest.PRO, Mike provides financial analysis and strategy to separately managed accounts for institutions and high-net worth individuals. In addition, Mike shares his insights through articles, speaking engagements, and educational videos on a broad array of topics including investment strategy, risk management, market structure and regulation at openinterest.pro.
Mike is a former member of the Philadelphia Stock Exchange, the American Stock Exchange and the New York Mercantile Exchange. Mike holds a BA from Tufts University.