Jeff Yass is a co-founder and managing director of Susquehanna International Group, the trading and market-making firm based in Bala Cynwyd, Pennsylvania, that he started with five college friends in 1987.
Jeff Yass is a co-founder and managing director of Susquehanna International Group, the trading and market-making firm based in Bala Cynwyd, Pennsylvania, that he started with five college friends in 1987.
Yass grew up in Queens, New York, and graduated from Bayside High School in 1975. He studied mathematics and economics at the State University of New York at Binghamton, where he and a group of fellow students met over card games, and later took graduate courses in economics at New York University. Before starting a trading firm he played poker and bet on horse races professionally.
In 1987 Yass and five Binghamton friends, among them Arthur Dantchik, founded Susquehanna International Group (SIG), named after the river near their university. The firm began in an office at the Philadelphia Stock Exchange, where trader Israel Englander sponsored Yass for a seat. SIG grew into one of the largest options and exchange-traded fund market makers in the United States, with more than 3,000 employees and offices in North America, Europe, Asia and Australia.
Through SIG's venture arm the firm became an early investor in ByteDance, the parent of TikTok. Yass is also one of the largest individual political donors in the United States, mostly to Republican and libertarian causes, and with his wife Janine he has funded the school-choice movement.
Sources · written 23 October 2026