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Exceed Investments

Exceed Investments

Let us be your Options Expert

  • Why Exceed
  • Strategy Spotlight
  • Who We Are
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Exceed Investments

Option Based Portfolio Management

Founding Principles

Enhanced Value

Option strategies can provide tremendous value through defining, hedging, optimizing, and diversifying market exposure.

Significant Expertise

Options are sophisticated with many
complex characteristics.

Strategic Alliance

Partner with Asset Managers and Advisors to better construct and manage option-based strategies.

Let Us Be Your Options Expert

Schedule a meeting

Why Options?

Options can provide advantages in all market environments:

In flat markets, they can provide higher yield. | Exceed Investments

In flat markets, they can provide higher yield.

Covered Calls
  • Monthly Yield
  • Additional participation and protection
  • Low market correlation
In down markets, they can partially or fully offset loss. | Exceed Investments

In down markets, they can partially or fully offset loss.

Collars
  • Tail-risk protection
  • Participate on upside
  • Consistent, low volatility performance
In up markets, they participate in a predetermined percentage of the uptick – including leveraged opportunities. | Exceed Investments

In up markets, they participate in a predetermined percentage of the uptick – including leveraged opportunities.

Leveraged spreads
  • Leveraged Upside
  • Potentially add buffered protection
  • Take advantage of bull market environments
Across complete market cycles, they may reduce risk and improve absolute returns. | Exceed Investments

Across complete market cycles, they may reduce risk and improve absolute returns.

Tactical Approach
  • Protection + Participation
  • Take advantage of option characteristics
  • Take advantage of market environments

Option trading can be complicated and risky, and some strategies may cause you to lose your entire investment. See Disclosures

Why Exceed

Performance

A history of strong risk-adjusted performance across our portfolio of strategies – Contact us for the most recent fact sheet and performance metrics

Experience

Principals’ past experience includes: Exchange specialists and market makers, Global bank trading, Risk Management, Proprietary, and Institutional Level Portfolio Management: Institutional level $1B+ portfolios on behalf of ING and Lehman.

Innovation

Pioneer / early implementer of defined outcome / structured note strategies with ‘40 act product and indexes.

Partnership

A history of strong partnerships including current alliances with TD Ameritrade, Catalyst Funds, and Tactical Fund Advisors

Financial Expertise Without Limits

Strategy Spotlight

Option strategies provide a number of unique benefits that may add further diversification, a better fit for an investment goal, and potential for alpha. If seeking a market hedge, generating yield, or a combination of both, option strategies may be for you. Following are a couple of examples that illustrate the power of option solutions.

Legend

  • Buffered Shield Strategy
  • S&P 500
  • Stepped Up Floor

1. Protect

2. Participate

3. Step Up Protection

For illustrative purposes only. Not intended to represent the actual performance of any strategy or of Exceed’s investment results.  

Option trading can be complicated and risky, and some strategies may cause you to lose your entire investment. See Disclosures

Strategy Spotlight: Covered Call

 | Exceed Investments
  • Provide additional yield in “flat” markets
  • Low correlation to markets
 | Exceed Investments
  • Reduce cost basis
  • Maintain investment horizon
  • Opportunistic in volatile markets
 | Exceed Investments
  • Participation on upside movement
  • Capture excess premium
  • Possible double benefit

For illustrative purposes only. Not intended to represent actual performance of any strategy or of Exceed’s investment results.

Option trading can be complicated and risky, and some strategies may cause you to lose your entire investment. See Disclosures

Options Can Provide

Enhanced
Performance

Participation

Yield

Hedge

Dampened
Volatility

Who We Are

Over 25 years of options focused experience including both listed and over the counter trading, engineering option based strategies in multiple instruments (including structured notes, indexes, mutual funds, and institutional level portfolios), advising, managing and educating, the Exceed team can assist in your needs.

Joe Halpern | Exceed Investments

Joe Halpern

Joe Halpern | Exceed Investments

Joe Halpern

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.

Bryan Sapp | Exceed Investments

Bryan Sapp

Bryan Sapp | Exceed Investments

Bryan Sapp

Mr. Sapp has spent the last 12 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, son, and two dogs.

Opportunities To Partner

  • Product Expertise
  • Business Expertise

Product Expertise

  • Separately Managed Accounts
  • Portfolio Management
  • Option Strategies
  • Trading
  • ETFs
  • Indexes
  • Mutual Funds
  • Insurance structures (Annuities, VIT)
  • Structured Notes

Business Expertise

  • Strategy Development
  • Strategy & Structure Alignment
  • Product Positioning
  • Product Launch

Blog

January 24, 2023

Tax Lessons Learned From Tesla

The past few years for Tesla (Ticker: TSLA) have been anything but mundane. Shares of the equity experienced a meteoric rise from mid-2019 to late 2022, with a trough-to-peak rally of over 3400% in a...Read More
January 5, 2023

Where Are Those “Top 10” Companies Now? – “Millennium” Focus

“Top” companies can seemingly do no wrong during their ascent. Whether filtered by top US companies by market cap or fastest growing over the last decade, these companies tend to be household names with a...Read More
December 13, 2022

Where Are Those “Top 10” Companies Now? – “Nineties” Focus

“Top” companies can seemingly do no wrong during their ascent. Whether filtered by top US companies by market cap or fastest growing over the last decade, these companies tend to be household names with a...Read More
November 22, 2022

Tax Avoidance Gone Wrong – The Rise and Fall of Facebook

Facebook’s IPO was one of the hottest ever.  The company was growing at an astounding rate as social media went fully mainstream, and everyone wanted in on the action. Facebook went public on May 12,...Read More
February 3, 2022

Case Study: How Options Investing Can Go Right (and Wrong) Using ARKK As an Example

In 2020, the ARKK Innovation ETF (ARKK) caught the imagination of the investing public after generating a 152% return for the year. ARKK seeks to invest in cutting edge, innovative companies – tomorrow’s most promising...Read More
January 9, 2019

Selling Insurance in Stormy Market Conditions

It may come as no big surprise that you wouldn’t have much luck trying to purchase flood insurance for your home on a barrier island in the middle of a catastrophic hurricane. However, let’s say...Read More

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  • 79 Madison Avenue 3rd floor,
    New York, NY 10016

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  • 646-580-7046

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Recent Posts

  • Tax Lessons Learned From Tesla
  • Where Are Those “Top 10” Companies Now? – “Millennium” Focus
  • Where Are Those “Top 10” Companies Now? – “Nineties” Focus

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