Mark Xue

Born to immigrant parents in a blue-collar Chicago neighborhood, Mark witnessed at an early age how hard his parents worked to provide a safe environment for their family.

He left home at 15 to attend the Illinois Math and Science Academy, a free public boarding school. He matriculated to Northwestern University, where his study of medicine was cut short by the Great Financial Crisis of 2008. To help his family, he found a job as a clerk at Consolidated Trading.

He discovered that he thrived in this competitive environment and leveraged the experience into a job on Morgan Stanley’s Convertible Bonds desk in Hong Kong.

A year later, he received a full scholarship and returned to Northwestern to finish his degree, swapping medicine for economics and computer science. Within two years of graduation, he was promoted to manage the volatility arbitrage book in Consumer, Healthcare, and Special Situations at Spot Trading in Chicago, where he consistently returned 30% on allocated capital.

At the end of 2016, Mark helped start a new volatility-focused fund based in Chicago, Polaris7 Investments. He worked with the technology team to develop and implement trading tools and helped design algorithmic trading execution strategies. Most importantly, he managed a volatility arbitrage and special situations portfolio that achieved a return on allocated capital that surpassed 65% in 2017.

In 2019, Mark joined Kaiju Capital Management to manage our VolArb strategies. He now manages our Cryptocurrency Trading practice.