Kershner Trading Group is a proprietary trading and technology firm headquartered in Austin, Texas, with a second U.S. office in midtown Manhattan and an office in Shanghai, China opened in 2012. The firm supplies its own capital, a proprietary trading platform called Gr8trade, and back office infrastructure to short term equities traders who trade manually or run algorithmic strategies. Gr8trade provides market data and order execution and includes tools for automating a trader's process, and Kershner layers on risk management, compliance oversight, quantitative support and trader education around that capital and technology base. The firm's differentiator within proprietary trading is that it funds individual and small team traders rather than running a single centralized book, positioning itself, in its own words, as wanting to be the place where short term traders make the most money and grow a career, rather than as a quant fund trading its own strategies at scale. Its traders operate across equities, working from physical trading floors in Austin and New York rather than remotely. Regulated trading is executed through its FINRA and SIPC member broker dealer subsidiary, which carries the market participant ID KRSH. The company traces its founding to 2001, when Andy Kershner, previously a partner at ProTrader Securities, started Kershner Trading Group in Austin following the sale of ProTrader to Instinet. Kershner remains CEO and Chairman; other named members of the management team include a Chief Compliance Officer and a Chief Financial Officer. As of 2026 the firm reports roughly 134 to 144 employees spread across its Austin, New York and Shanghai locations. In May 2024, the SEC announced a settled enforcement action against the firm's Kershner Trading Americas, LLC entity for violating Rule 105 of Regulation M, finding it had purchased shares in 23 follow on public stock offerings between February 2019 and June 2022 after short selling the same securities during the restricted period ahead of each offering; without admitting or denying the findings, the firm agreed to pay disgorgement of 593,375.76 dollars, prejudgment interest of 94,268.84 dollars and a civil penalty of 812,355.40 dollars, and to adopt written compliance procedures to prevent further Rule 105 violations.
