All-In Summit: Jenny Just on Peak6, the female market correction, poker, and risk

Jenny Just built Peak6 from $1.5 million in 1997 into a multi-billion-dollar trading and technology company that she says has never had a losing year. The firm moved off exchange floors early, survived the dot-com bust, financial crisis and COVID, and repaid its early outside investors many times over.

Peak6’s Apex Fintech Solutions quietly sits behind a large share of consumer fintech. Just said Apex serves 220 B2B clients, has $120 billion in assets and tens of millions of end customers, and powers more than 60% of fintechs.

Peak6 is not a high-frequency firm; it deliberately carries options inventory and manages risk more like a retailer manages stock. At any moment it holds positions across 3,000–4,000 stock names, trades hundreds of thousands of options daily, and makes technology its largest expense.

Peak6 had built one of the five largest option inventories in its history because volatility looked unusually cheap despite stretched markets. Just stressed this was not a call on direction: the firm was positioning for a large move either way and accepted that the inventory could simply decay.

Just’s main bet outside trading is Poker Power, built to give women repeated practice with risk, strategy and capital allocation. She said it has taught tens of thousands of women and reached 200 companies, including major technology firms, banks, investment banks and law firms.

Her core diagnosis is not that women need to take bigger risks, but that many need more repetitions of taking risk at all. In Poker Power’s corporate programs, she said senior women often report realizing they were not “playing to win” or were entering meetings assuming they had to know everything.

A man from an old, successful firm told Just that women seeking partnership there routinely arrived with perfect track records and no losing years. She saw that as backwards: high-level investing rewards “slugging percentage,” meaning many controlled failures are acceptable if the successful bets are large enough.