Options involve substantial risk and are not suitable for all investors. Read our Risk Disclosure.

About us

Discipline is the product.

Peak Signal Trading was founded in Chicago in 2016 by derivatives-pit alumni and quant engineers, on a single thesis: traders don't fail from a lack of information — they fail from a lack of process.

01 — The Story

Born on the floor. Rebuilt for the screen.

Peak Signal started in 2016 in a rented room above the Board of Trade at 141 W Jackson — six people, most of them straight off the derivatives floor, the rest quant engineers who had built market-data infrastructure for firms that measure edge in microseconds. The frustration that founded the company was simple: retail platforms sold prediction, while every serious desk we had ever sat on ran on process.

In 2018 we shipped Signal Engine v1 — the first flow-anomaly engine priced for individuals — and watched 900 beta members use it well, and badly. The lesson of those years was blunt: a good signal delivered late, or acted on without sizing rules, is indistinguishable from noise. So we stopped building a faster feed and started building a discipline — detection, validation, and guardrails in one loop.

That conviction paid for the hardest project in our history: the latency rebuild, which tore out and rewrote the entire ingest-and-scoring path until median alert delivery hit 92 milliseconds. And it explains our oldest rule — the desk trades its own signals, with firm capital, inside the same guardrails members use. We eat the slippage, feel the drawdowns, and fix what hurts first. Skin in the game isn't a slogan here; it's the QA process.

The desk trades firm capital only — never member funds. Desk results are not indicative of member results, and nothing on this page is investment advice.

2016 Founded · Chicago 141 W Jackson Blvd, above the Board of Trade
0 People on the desk Traders, engineers, researchers — no sales floor
0 Offices Chicago · New York · Austin
0+ Members 4.2M signals delivered in 2025
02 — Principles

Four rules we don't break.

/ 01

Signal over noise

Markets produce infinitely more information than meaning. Everything we build compresses the first into the second — and says nothing when there is nothing to say.

/ 02

Risk before return

We size the downside before we admire the upside. Guardrails ship in the product because they run our desk: exposure first, entry second, always.

/ 03

Process over prediction

We don't sell forecasts. We sell a repeatable loop — detect, test, size, review — built to survive being wrong, because every trader eventually is.

/ 04

Skin in the game

The desk trades the signals members receive, inside the same guardrails. When the tools fail, we feel it first — and fix it fastest.

03 — The Desk

The people behind the process.

Thirty-eight people across three offices. These eight run the book.

Elena Vasquez

CEO & Co-founder

18 years in Chicago derivatives; made markets in index options at CBOE.

Priya Raman

CTO

Ex-HFT infrastructure engineer; architect of the 92ms alert pipeline.

Daniel Okafor

Head of Research

Volatility PhD; writes the desk blotter members read every week.

Sarah Lindqvist

Head of Risk

Former clearing-house risk officer; owns the guardrail methodology.

Marcus Chen

Head of Product

Turns desk workflow into software; ex-buy-side analytics PM.

Aisha Thompson

Head of Member Success

Runs onboarding and education for 40,200+ member accounts.

Tomáš Novak

Lead Data Engineer

Keeps 14 years of tick history queryable in milliseconds.

Rachel Kim

General Counsel

Ex-derivatives regulation attorney; keeps the desk compliance-first.

04 — The Road

Ten years, compounded.

2016

Founded in Chicago

Six people in a rented room above the Board of Trade, building the tools they wished the floor had.

2018

Signal Engine v1 ships

The first flow-anomaly engine priced for individuals goes live to 900 beta members — sweeps and blocks scored in real time.

2020

Options analytics & Strategy Lab

Full chain analytics and backtesting against tick-level history launch as the desk goes distributed.

2022

Institutional desk opens in New York

Dedicated coverage for funds, family offices, and prop groups opens at 200 Vesey Street.

2024

Latency rebuild hits 92ms

The ingest-and-scoring path is rewritten end to end; median alert latency drops to 92 milliseconds.

2026

40,000 members & an Austin office

Membership passes 40,000 and the third office opens at 600 Congress Avenue, Austin.

05 — Careers

We hire skeptics.

Good traders demand evidence. So do good engineers. If your first instinct is "prove it," you'll fit right in.

Hiring runs like the desk runs: show your work. First-round exercises are blind — reviewed with no résumé, no school, no last employer attached — and every offer follows a working session with the team you'd join. We pay for demonstrated judgment, not pedigree.

Nothing open that fits? Make the case anyway — careers@peaksignaltrading.com

Get started

Join 40,000 traders with a process.

Fourteen days of the full desk, free. Bring your watchlist and your skepticism — the process does the rest.

No credit card required · Cancel anytime · Options involve substantial risk — read our Risk Disclosure.