Mako is a London-founded derivatives market making firm that provides liquidity and pricing across listed and OTC options and other derivatives in equities, fixed income, commodities and currencies. It executes on proprietary, low-latency trading technology developed in house, and its business today spans market making alongside two investment management arms, Mako Investment Managers (a fixed income fund manager) and Mako Global Investors. The group operates from seven offices across four continents: London, Dublin, Amsterdam, Singapore, Sydney, Brisbane and Chengdu. Mako's specialism is options market making, historically centred on European equity index options and global fixed income derivatives, servicing bank and broker counterparties rather than retail clients. Unlike market makers that stayed single-desk partnerships or were absorbed into larger banks, Mako grew partly through consolidation with peer firms of similar vintage: it combined its London options books with Liquid Capital's London operations in January 2022, then onboarded Liquid Capital's Asia-Pacific business in 2023, a deal the firm framed as two European options market makers formed in the 2000s pooling technology and trading platforms. The firm traces its origin to a 1999 management buyout of Saratoga, a London floor-trading options firm active on LIFFE, carried out by David Segel and Paul Britton, who renamed the business Mako Global Derivatives; Segel remains Founder and President of the group. Britton left in 2004 to buy out Mako's US operations and found Capstone Investment Advisors as a separate firm. Close Brothers Group acquired a stake in Mako in 2007; Mako management repurchased full ownership from Close Brothers in 2015 after an eight-year partnership. Mako's UK entities, Mako Global Derivatives Partnership LLP and Mako Financial Markets Partnership LLP, are authorised and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority, and Mako Derivatives Amsterdam BV is regulated by the Dutch AFM. In February 2025 the FCA issued a final notice fining Mako Financial Markets Partnership LLP 1,662,700 pounds (reduced from 1,887,800 pounds for early settlement, of which 1,137,283 pounds was disgorgement) for anti-money-laundering systems and controls failures between December 2013 and November 2015. The notice found Mako had breached FCA Principles 2 and 3 by inadequately assessing the risk of business introduced by the Solo Group, executing purported OTC equity trades of roughly 68.6 billion pounds in Danish equities and 23.6 billion pounds in Belgian equities that the regulator linked to a wider dividend-arbitrage scheme, for which Mako received about 1.45 million pounds in commission.
