Desk design and organisation
What the desk needs, at what seniority, in what order. How trading, quant research, risk and technology divide. Reporting lines, governance, and compensation benchmarked against market.
We help investment firms design, staff and operate derivatives trading capability — from the first org chart to the first trade, and through the first year of running it.
The problem
A firm decides it wants to trade options — to add a volatility book, to hedge an existing portfolio properly, or to launch a strategy that needs them. Then it discovers the capability cannot simply be bought.
It needs people it has no way to assess. Technology it cannot evaluate without already having the expertise. A risk framework its investors and regulators will accept before a single trade is placed. And an order of operations that does not waste a year and a great deal of money finding out what should have come first.
Hiring a senior derivatives professional to answer those questions costs several hundred thousand a year and is hard to undo if the answer turns out to be “not yet”. We provide that judgement for as long as it is needed, and no longer.
What we do
What the desk needs, at what seniority, in what order. How trading, quant research, risk and technology divide. Reporting lines, governance, and compensation benchmarked against market.
Candidate profiles, evaluation criteria, technical interview design and scoring. Advice on choosing a search partner. We design the process and help you judge people; we do not place them.
Greeks management across delta, gamma, vega, theta and rho. Position and loss limits, scenario analysis, stress testing, escalation. Review of trading mandates and internal risk policy.
Pricing and risk engines, execution management, market data, post-trade analytics, position management. Build versus buy, vendor evaluation, and a sequenced procurement plan with real costs.
Pricing methodology, volatility surface construction, model choice and validation. Strategy design and development where the mandate calls for it.
Running the book — taking and managing positions, execution, and day-to-day risk — while your permanent traders are recruited and trained. Carried on under your permissions or a hosting firm's.
How engagements work
Work is scoped as written deliverables with dates against them — an organisational design, a risk framework document, a technology specification, a build-out roadmap. You know what arrives and when.
Each engagement is shaped around the firm and what it needs. The aim is a capability your own people operate, not a dependency on us.
Who we work with
About
Lyapunov Advisory is led by Thibaut Herens, who spent eleven years at Optiver, latterly as a partner running equity derivatives. The firm is built on that experience: desks that were actually built, traded and handed over, rather than a consulting method applied to an unfamiliar market.
The name comes from Lyapunov stability — the mathematics of whether a system returns to equilibrium after it is disturbed. It is a fair description of what a well-built options desk is supposed to do.