Your Team — The People Behind Every Trade

You're not handing your capital to a logo or a brand. You're entrusting it to specific human beings — and you should know exactly who they are, what they've done, and why they're here. These are the six people who show up before dawn every trading day at 139 West Hastings Street in Vancouver, manage real capital with real consequences, and go home knowing every decision was intentional.

Since founding IBKR Investments in 2010, this team has collectively executed thousands of trades across equities, options, futures, and FX — delivering 12.4% net annualized returns. Every team member invests their own capital alongside yours. That's not a marketing line. It's a founding principle.

6
Dedicated
Professionals
75+
Combined Years
of Experience
100%
Co-invest Their
Own Capital
16
Years Operating
Since 2010
MH
Marcus Hale
Founder & Chief Investment Officer
CFA Charterholder CMT B.Comm, UBC '03

Picture a hospital room at Vancouver General, February 2010. Ceiling tiles. The hum of machines. And a man filling notebooks with position-sizing frameworks because there was nothing else to do. That man built IBKR Investments from those 47 pages of handwritten notes — and seven years of institutional trading experience at Canaccord Genuity and Raymond James before that. You can read the full founding story here. Marcus reviews every trading journal entry this team produces. Not because he doesn't trust them — because the details matter. A 2% difference in entry price on a $500K position is $10,000. Multiply that across hundreds of trades and you understand why obsession with precision isn't optional. His dual CFA and CMT designations reflect a rare fluency in both fundamental valuation and technical market structure — the combination that underpins every strategy the firm deploys.

Restores vintage mechanical watches on weekends — a hobby he says mirrors the discipline of systematic trading. "Every gear has a purpose. Remove one and the whole thing stops working. That's exactly how I think about a trading system." His collection includes a 1967 Omega Seamaster he found in a pawn shop the week the firm turned profitable.
I built this firm from a hospital bed because life is too short for mediocre work. Sixteen years later, that urgency hasn't faded.
PC
Priya Chandrasekaran
Director of Quantitative Strategy
M.Sc. Financial Engineering University of Toronto

Before Priya joined IBKR Investments, she was building execution algorithms for a Chicago-based proprietary trading firm — the kind of place where nanoseconds matter and the math is unforgiving. Then Marcus cold-called her. It was 2015, and she'd just presented at a conference on mean-reversion signals in commodity futures. Most people in the audience asked polite, forgettable questions. Marcus had seventeen follow-up questions. Seventeen. She knew immediately this was someone who cared about getting it right, not just getting it done. Today, she leads all algorithmic strategy development, backtesting, walk-forward optimization, and systematic deployment across every asset class the firm trades. Every quantitative model at the firm carries her fingerprint — from the mean-reversion frameworks applied in equity and futures strategies to the volatility surface models Jonas Eriksson uses for options pricing.

Her approach to model validation is unusually rigorous. No strategy goes live without a minimum of 10,000 simulated trade iterations, out-of-sample testing across three distinct market regimes, and a live paper-trade period of no fewer than 90 days. Some of her insights on systematic trading methodology are published in our research section.

Runs ultramarathons and tracks her training data with the same rigor she applies to walk-forward optimization. Her Strava profile has more data points than some of our backtests. She'll tell you the parallels between mile 60 of a 100-mile race and navigating a drawdown are uncomfortably real — both test whether your system holds when your body and mind are screaming to quit.
Marcus had seventeen follow-up questions after my conference talk. Seventeen. I knew immediately this was someone who cared about getting it right.
DO
Derek Okafor
Senior Portfolio Trader
CIM 12+ Years Active Trading

It's 5:15 AM Pacific. The office at 139 West Hastings is dark except for one desk. That's Derek. Over twelve years of active trading across North American and European equity markets — five of those years at TD Securities in Toronto — have drilled a single conviction into him: the market doesn't care about your opinion; it cares about your preparation. He relocated to Vancouver specifically to join this team in 2014, making him the longest-tenured member after Marcus himself. Derek is the first person in every morning, scanning pre-market data, reviewing overnight moves in European indices, checking Asian session close prints, and preparing the day's watchlist before Marcus or anyone else arrives.

His execution skills are the firm's competitive edge in discretionary trading. Derek's average slippage on equity positions is consistently below 3 basis points — a number that compounds into meaningful alpha across a year of active trading. He manages the lion's share of the firm's discretionary equity positions, from swing trades held for days to tactical allocations held for months. When you call IBKR Investments and Sienna Marchetti tells you response time dropped to under four hours, Derek is one of the reasons why — his meticulous trade documentation means client questions can be answered quickly and completely.

Coaches his daughter's youth basketball team. Says it improved his ability to explain complex concepts simply — a skill that translates directly to client communication. "If I can explain a stop-loss to a group of ten-year-olds, I can explain it to anyone." On weekends you'll find him at the North Vancouver Seymour trails, usually before sunrise.
The market doesn't care about your opinion. It cares about your preparation. I've never once regretted over-preparing.
SM
Sienna Marchetti
Head of Client Strategy & Risk Communication
CFP CFA Level III Candidate B.A. Economics, McGill

Sienna is the voice you hear when you call IBKR Investments. She joined in 2017 from RBC Dominion Securities, where she'd grown frustrated watching brilliant trading strategies get lost in translation between the desk and the client. Her job — the one she designed for herself, honestly — is to bridge that gap. Every monthly report, every quarterly review, every onboarding conversation flows through her. She translates iron condor attribution and Greek exposure into language that makes sense, and she does it without dumbing anything down. You leave every conversation knowing more than when you started.

Her client onboarding process is deliberately thorough. Before a single dollar moves, Sienna conducts a 90-minute discovery conversation covering investment experience, risk tolerance, income requirements, tax situation, and — crucially — emotional relationship with volatility. That information shapes every recommendation the trading team makes. She's also the architect behind the firm's quarterly performance reviews, which present full attribution data, strategy-by-strategy breakdowns, and forward-looking risk assessments. If you want to understand exactly what your money did and why, Sienna makes that possible. Existing clients can access her reports anytime through the client portal.

An avid home cook who treats Italian pasta-making with the same precision she applies to drawdown analysis. "Al dente is a risk tolerance question," she says, completely seriously. Her homemade tagliatelle has been known to improve team morale during losing weeks. The office kitchen has a dedicated shelf for her imported semolina flour.
Our clients don't need to understand iron condors. They need to understand what their money is doing and why. That translation is my job.
JE
Jonas Eriksson
Derivatives Specialist & Options Strategist
M.Fin., Rotman Canadian Securities Registration

Jonas spent four years trading index options at a Montreal-based volatility fund — the kind of place where gamma exposure isn't an abstraction, it's the difference between a good day and a catastrophic one. He joined IBKR Investments in 2019, and the firm's options capability expanded immediately. Multi-leg structures, portfolio-level Greek management, hedged income strategies — Jonas builds them, stress tests them, and manages them in real time. When he recommends an iron condor structure to a client, his own money is in it. Every time. That's not a policy. It's a personal rule.

His specialization in volatility surface modeling gives the firm a structural advantage in options markets. Jonas monitors implied volatility skew across more than 200 underlyers daily, identifying mispriced structures that create asymmetric risk/reward opportunities. He works closely with Priya's quantitative models to validate option pricing assumptions and with Derek to time execution for optimal fill quality. His stress-testing protocols subject every options position to a +/- 3 standard deviation move scenario before it goes live — because, as he puts it, "the tail risk that wipes you out is the one you didn't model." Some of his thinking on derivatives risk management appears in our research section.

Competitive chess player ranked in the top 200 in British Columbia. "Options trading is chess with money. Every move opens possibilities and closes others. The best players — and the best traders — think three moves ahead and always have an exit." He plays at the Vancouver Chess Club on Thursday evenings and says it's the only activity that exercises the same mental muscles as managing a complex options book.
The Greeks aren't just math — they're the language of risk. When I manage gamma exposure, I'm managing the speed at which things can go wrong.
AC
Amara Chen
Operations Manager & Compliance Coordinator
CPA, CGA 10+ Years Financial Operations

Here's the thing nobody tells you about boutique trading firms: the compliance infrastructure is what separates serious operations from cowboys. Amara built ours from scratch when she joined in 2016, bringing ten years of financial operations experience from Manulife and a Vancouver-based family office. Trade settlement, regulatory reporting under National Instrument 31-103, internal audit processes, CIRO membership maintenance (Member ID: CIRO-4192) — every single system runs through her desk. The team's 100% compliance record across sixteen years of operations isn't an accident. It's Amara, showing up every day with the same meticulous attention to detail that makes a CPA a CPA.

Beyond regulatory compliance, Amara manages the operational backbone that makes everything else possible. She oversees custody relationships, reconciles every trade against broker confirmations within 24 hours, manages the firm's BCSC registration (Registration No. 2010-PMRD-00847), and conducts quarterly internal audits that would satisfy most external regulators. When the firm decided to build the client portal, Amara led the data integrity requirements — ensuring that every performance number, every trade log, and every document clients see has been independently verified. Her philosophy is simple: trust is built in the details nobody sees.

Volunteers with the Financial Literacy Council of BC, teaching investing basics to newcomers to Canada. "If I can explain compliance to a room of new immigrants, I can explain it to anyone." She says the questions newcomers ask are often sharper than the ones industry veterans think to ask — because they haven't learned to take anything for granted. She's taught over 200 workshops since 2018.
People think compliance is a cost center. I think it's a trust center. Every process I build is designed to make our clients' money safer.

How Six People Outperform Firms of Sixty

We're small by design. No bureaucracy, no committee approvals, no layers between the person managing your capital and the person you talk to. These three principles define how we work — and they're non-negotiable.

Skin in the Game

Every team member invests their own capital in the same strategies they recommend to clients. When the portfolio has a drawdown, we feel it in the same place you do — our account balances. This alignment of interests isn't aspirational; it's structural. Learn more about our investment philosophy.

Radical Transparency

Every trade is logged, timestamped, and attributed. Every client gets full access to their performance data, strategy breakdowns, and risk metrics through the client portal. We don't hide behind aggregated numbers or cherry-picked time periods. You see exactly what we do and why.

Continuous Improvement

Every Friday afternoon, the entire team reviews the week's trades in a structured debrief. What worked, what didn't, what we'd do differently. No ego, no defensiveness — just data and honest analysis. These sessions have produced some of our most significant strategy refinements over sixteen years. Read our latest thinking in the research section.

Put These Six People to Work for Your Portfolio

You've seen who we are. You know the credentials, the track records, and — honestly — the personalities. The next step is a conversation with Sienna Marchetti, our Head of Client Strategy. No pitch deck, no sales script. Just a 30-minute call to understand your goals, your risk tolerance, and whether our approach is the right fit. Six people who take your capital as seriously as their own, because it is their own.

Minimum investment: $500,000. We take on fewer than 20 new client relationships per year — because every client deserves the full attention of this team. Review our complete service offerings or explore our market coverage before reaching out.

Important Disclosures

Past performance is not indicative of future results. All investment performance figures cited on this website represent historical data and do not guarantee future outcomes.

Investing involves risk, including the possible loss of principal. Active trading strategies carry additional risks including, but not limited to, market risk, liquidity risk, and execution risk.

IBKR Investments Inc. is registered as a Portfolio Manager and Investment Fund Manager with the British Columbia Securities Commission (BCSC), Registration No. 2010-PMRD-00847. Member of the Canadian Investment Regulatory Organization (CIRO), Member ID: CIRO-4192, operating under National Instrument 31-103.

The content on this website is provided for informational purposes only and does not constitute personalized investment advice. Please consult with a qualified professional before making investment decisions.