Susquehanna's head of prediction markets hired his old friend: an ex-Morgan Stanley trading head
In 2006, Columbia University student Jeremy Maletz won the third place prize in a poker tournament hosted by Susquehanna, an electronic trading firm. He joined the firm as a graduate and worked his way up to become the head of its burgeoning prediction markets team. The Columbia Spectator reported that he was invited alongside his friend Nick Volbi, who subsequently opted for a more traditional career path in banking. Now, however, the pair are reunited.
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Nick Volbi joined Susquehanna as its head of institutional prediction markets; his LinkedIn profile says the role involves providing businesses with "bespoke risk transfer" using event contracts on platforms like Kalshi and Polymarket. FINRA's BrokerCheck tool suggests that he joined the firm last Wednesday. Volbi spent most of his career at Morgan Stanley, where he made MD in 2020 and was latterly its head of equity index derivatives trading. He left the bank for BNP Paribas in 2025, where he worked as deputy head of index flow derivatives trading prior to joining Susquehanna.
The Columbia Spectator said Alex Verbuch also attended the tournament with Maletz and Volbi. He too works at Susquehanna as head of trading for the firm's Bahamas-based crypto trading entity. It's not clear whether Maletz and Volbi have remained in touch since the tournament, nor whether Maletz was directly involved in the hiring process. Neither responded to a request for comment.
Speaking on Bloomberg's Odd Lots podcast in June, Maletz said Susquehanna was one of the earliest firms to enter the prediction markets space and wants to be a "shepherd for other institutions as they get involved." He said that the goal is for institutions to use event contracts to hedge against the real world impacts of the event itself. Susquehanna's founder Jeff Yass said there's also an altruistic element to growing prediction markets. He said on the Generating Alpha podcast last October that one use case for prediction markets is to fact check governments; for example, he argued it could prevent wars by giving the public a more accurate prediction for the expected cost of entering into a conflict.
Susquehanna is growing its prediction markets team. It has openings for a trader, software developer and data engineer working on prediction markets in its Philadelphia HQ. It's also hiring a quantitative sports trader in Dublin "focused primarily on trading on prediction markets."
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