Kershner Trading Group

Kershner Trading Group did not grow out of a trading desk. It grew out of software. The firm traces to Protrader, a trading platform whose sale to Instinet in 2001 seeded the Austin operation, and that DNA still shows: Kershner backs its traders with both firm capital and its own execution and analytics system, Gr8trade.

The model is pure prop. Kershner stakes US equity traders entirely with house capital and splits the profits, letting each set their own style, manual or algorithmic, inside the firm's risk framework. It takes proven traders with a real track record and also trains novices from scratch, a wider door than most prop shops bother to open. From Austin it reaches east coast markets through a New York office and has kept a Shanghai presence since 2012, early for a US equity prop firm to plant a flag in China.