PROFILE
SRP China 2021 Personality of the Year: TANG Jun TANG Jun (汤俊), managing director, head of equity derivatives at Shenwan Hongyuan Securities, has been awarded the inaugural Personality of the Year accolade at SRP China Awards.
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s a native of the former Chinese capital Nanjing, Tang Jun began his career as an equity derivatives trader assistant at Société Générale in Paris in 2007 and earned his second master’s degree from CentraleSupélec on the job. He moved to London for BNP Paribas in 2009 before returning to China to join the equity derivatives team at Citic Securities, the biggest Chinese securities house by assets, in 2015. With a 14-year track record, Tang was tapped to lead the growing equity derivatives business at Shenwan Hongyuan Securities (SWHY) in early 2020 – the securities house which has state-owned China Jianyin Investment as its main shareholder and has assets under management close to CNY600 billion (US$93.5 billion). It is among the 10 largest securities houses in China. Tang became a member of the executive committee at the firm in 2021. Under Tang’s leadership, the derivatives manufacturer traded 2,198 options over-the-counter (OTC) with a total notional amount of CNY456.8 billion in 2020, an increase of 175.3% year-on-year and translated to a market share of 18.2%. The expansion came also after SWHY was granted a cross-border license in July 2020, enabling the firm to offer offshore securities-linked products and became a tier-1 OTC option dealer in December 2020. On the retail side, the securities house issued a total of 820 structured notes in 2020, amounting to CNY13.5 billion in notional. The 2020 issuance included the debut of products with exotic payoffs in China including snowball autocallable notes and principal-protected index enhancement notes – both were linked to the performance of CSI 500 index. In an interview with SRP, Tang reflected his career path in structured products and shared his observations and outlook on the Chinese market, which is “filled with potential”.
of technology in derivatives models and the pricing of structured products was fascinating to me. As a leader in global equity derivatives, Société Générale had invested heavily in model development, architecture, product design and trading with a technology team of nearly 2,000 people in the headquarter. It already applied what’s nowadays known as "graphics card computing" to the development of derivatives models. There was no concept of “fintech” yet, but I had a hunch that the combination of finance and technological innovation would become the trend. What changes have you observed in the Chinese market following your return in 2015? Tang: China’s derivatives market has a history of over a decade, which can be summarised into three stages – exploration, gradual maturity and rapid growth. During the exploration, the A-share market was fairly active back in 2015 when Chinese and foreign securities companies were generally in a period of vigorous development. Many securities houses began to lay out their derivatives business driven by regulatory schemes, although the business was insignificant in terms of income generation. At that time, the firms were gradually striving for the pilot qualifications for OTC derivatives trading and for cross-border business where vanilla options and income swaps were dominant. The model pricing, risk indicators and business frameworks were just established in the derivatives segment. And there were very limited talents available.
You studied bachelor’s degree in computer science. What brought you to the financial market?
As a result, the proprietary trading was mostly carried out through a traditional research approach based on stock fundamentals. Securities houses started to expand to actively managed wealth products, derivatives, and quantitative businesses from their traditional investment banking and brokerage business.
Tang: Back in 2007, the derivatives business in the European and American markets were booming. The application
After 2016, the linear income swap business gradually scaled down while the OTC options business expanded. For the
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