Exceed Investments

Over a 25 year financial career, Mr. Halpern has structured, priced, and traded billions of dollars in structured products, exotic derivatives, and listed vanilla options in addition to managing trading groups, supervising risk management and participating in executive level, firm-wide strategic initiatives.

Mr. Halpern founded Exceed Investments in order to take advantage of the unique characteristics that options present in defining, hedging, and/or optimizing a market exposure. Exceed’s first initiative was to combine the beneficial elements of structured notes with that of mutual funds. Exceed currently sub-advises on four mutual funds that use elements of structured notes in providing a defined level of downside protection. Consistently a thought leader in the space, under the direction of Mr. Halpern Exceed continues to innovate, resulting in a number of 1sts in the industry inclusive of the first mutual fund using a structured notes approach, optimization features allowing for evergreen characteristics, and with more to come.

Prior to founding Exceed Investments, Mr. Halpern was a Director at Lamco, the asset management division of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. He managed the exotic derivatives commodities book, a multi-billion complex OTC derivative portfolio, was the chief negotiator on a number of global bank settlements and was a lead member of a task force on structured products.

Prior to joining Lamco, Mr. Halpern was Director on the Equity Derivatives Trading desk of ING Financial Markets, a global financial institution. As a Director, Mr. Halpern was responsible for structuring, pricing, and trading an array of exotic derivatives for the global sales force. Prior to joining ING, Mr. Halpern was SVP of Strategy and Risk for Kellogg Capital Group’s derivatives division.

From 1996 to 2002, Mr. Halpern was at Letco Specialists, since acquired by TD Securities, where he began his career as a derivatives trader. Mr. Halpern became the youngest partner at Letco Specialists. He was responsible for the IT build-out for the company’s east coast operations while managing a trading division and a proprietary portfolio. He was also the primary market maker on the American Stock Exchange in a number of highly volatile, active derivative listings.

Mr. Halpern lives in New York City with his wife and three children.

Mr. Sapp has spent the last 14 years of his career analyzing and trading financial markets.  Prior to joining Exceed, Bryan was a Senior Market Strategist at Schaeffer’s Investment Research, where he designed, managed, and evaluated various equity option strategies.  In addition to his trading responsibilities, Mr. Sapp provided unique options education for hundreds of thousands of investors at both the institutional and retail level.

Bryan joined Exceed in 2022 to lead the initiative of tax optimization for concentrated positions and other hedging and yield-generating strategies.

Mr. Sapp is a CFA Charterholder and lives in Rockford, IL with his wife and two sons, George and Theo.