April 24, 2013, NEW YORK, NY—SMB Capital, a leading proprietary trading desk based in Manhattan, and Kershner Trading Group (Austin, Texas and now New York City), have teamed up to create a joint venture for a new trading office in Midtown Manhattan. The JV offers traders a true trading partner, where the firm provides technology with an edge, large trading accounts, and low execution costs to those with a solid track record, and assumes all trading risk.

Traders will have a technology edge in the proprietary trading space whereby traders can become more bionic and build automated strategies. The firm owns and develops a suite of trading tools available only to the firm’s traders. Gr8trade, the execution platform, is combined with Gr8script, enabling traders to build automated strategies without the need for coding skills. Insight, a platform that Kershner acquired in 2007, and which has 1500+ existing stock scans along with the ability to build your own, is also available. Quant support is provided to traders who wish to build algorithmic strategies and custom filters.

This joint venture provides an infrastructure of education, mentoring, and coaching from leading traders in an environment where traders share their best ideas (traders will also have access to our AM meeting where some of the best trading opportunities of the trading day are highlighted). Finally, there are opportunities for new and developing traders with the right background to gain access to SMB’s recognized trader training programs, including a summer program for college students.

“We believe that the next wave in trading will be the democratization of automation,” said KTG’s Founder and CEO Andy Kershner. “Successful traders will continue to become more bionic, and we believe that the conjunction of full backing of traders and strategies with good training will be the keys to the trading business for the foreseeable future. Our merger with SMB Capital and the JV with SMB University gives us several things: great management, good traders, and a scalable training program. While there is a lot of work to do, we could not be happier with the opportunity and people we are joining together.”

“We are excited to join with our long-time friends in this new midtown NYC JV,” said Mike Bellafiore, Senior Partner and Co-Founder of SMB Capital. “KTG offers wonderful proprietary technology for traders: custom filters for favorite setups, exit management tools, and easy software to build auto strategies. Combining this outstanding technology with our existing traders and infrastructure for education, coaching, and mentoring will provide a superior value proposition for all our proprietary traders. ”