Raising The Stakes

With poker and option theory, Susquehanna International has become a key player in the fast-expanding ETF market.

- Annie Massa

On city avenue in the Philadelphia suburb of Bala Cynwyd, Pa., across the street from a TGI Fridays and California Pizza Kitchen, sits a bland building that looks like any other corporate office. The only notable feature is in the parking lot: a large oak labeled a “significant tree” because it survived the American Revolution.

And yet within that dull gray-brown edifice, away from the trading hubs of New York and Chicago, sits a crucial engine of the $5 trillion global exchange-traded fund market, one increasingly relied upon by investors ranging from hedge funds to individuals. What’s more, the little-known billionaires behind the operation have groomed a generation of canny market experts.

Like its headquarters, Susquehanna International Group LLP is hidden in plain sight. It keeps a low profile even though its fingerprints are everywhere in financial markets. In addition to ranking among the largest U.S. traders of ETFs, it’s a giant in options trading and has plowed into sports betting, private equity, and even Bitcoin.

Susquehanna, as well as other under-the-radar, closely held competitors created by its alumni, such as Jane Street Group LLC, grease the wheels of the ETF market, keeping the instruments inexpensive and easy to trade. As better-known Wall Street companies such as Goldman Sachs Group Inc. have stepped back from performing this function in recent years, regulators have started asking more questions about the stability of the market, which has become dependent on Susquehanna and its brethren.