I'm Xander S.

01 Background

I'm a sophomore at the University of Pennsylvania, studying Economics at Wharton with concentrations in Finance and in Statistics & Data Science. The pairing is deliberate: I wanted the vocabulary to make an argument about a business and the tools to check whether the argument survives contact with data.

Before Penn I spent eight years at BASIS DC, where I graduated as valedictorian. The thing I actually care about from that stretch isn't the transcript — it's that I started an investment club in 2022 with no idea what I was doing and left it with 25 members, four Stock Market Game teams, and two runs at the Wharton Investment Competition. Building that club taught me the lesson I keep relearning: the hard part is almost never the analysis, it's getting people to show up and care.

I was also a varsity captain in basketball and ultimate frisbee, and president of our Youth & Government delegation. Different rooms, same skill — figuring out what a group needs and then doing that instead of what you'd rather be doing.

02 On Markets

My way into markets was not a stock. It was a spread. In high school I kept noticing that two things which looked identical on paper traded at different prices, and that nobody could give me a clean answer as to why. Sometimes the answer was risk I hadn't priced. Sometimes it was a constraint — a mandate, a regulation, a forced seller. That second category is still the one I find most interesting, because it's where the inefficiency is structural rather than informational.

That interest is why I gravitated toward fixed income before equities. At the Penn Student Federal Credit Union I independently manage $6K of capital inside a $3M portfolio, analyzing agency MBS, Treasuries, and municipals. It is a small sleeve, and that's the point: at that size I can be wrong cheaply and often. What the seat has actually taught me is that duration and convexity are easy to compute and hard to feel. A mortgage-backed security's cash flows depend on thousands of households deciding when to refinance, which makes prepayment less a math problem than a behavioral one wearing a math problem's clothes.

The thing I'm least sure about is how much of what looks like edge is really just compensated risk I haven't identified yet. My algorithmic trading research backtested to roughly 3% monthly outperformance against the S&P — and the honest reading of that number is not that I found alpha at seventeen. It's that I built something that fit the past well, and I still don't have a rigorous way to separate a strategy that works from one that was lucky in-sample. Figuring out where that line sits is most of what I want to learn next.

03 Work

04 Projects

05 Communities

Wharton Hedge Fund Club — I'm a Portfolio Manager and lead the 20-student Quant/Macro committee. I teach CAPM, market making, FX carry, statistical arbitrage, and macro trade construction through trading simulations and pitch exercises. Teaching is the reason I understand any of it properly; you find the holes in your own model the first time a sophomore asks a good question.

Global Equity Management — Board member and co-lead of the 30-student analyst training program. I write curriculum and run workshops on accounting, valuation, modeling, and equity research, and I coach analysts through stock pitches and the internal competition.

First Tee DC & Youth on Course — I co-chaired both a 25-member local council and a 30-member national leadership council over four years, shipping 10+ community projects. Golf was the pretext; the councils were really about giving teenagers a budget and a vote and seeing what they'd do with it.

Also around campus: Wharton Undergraduate Finance Club, Wharton Undergraduate Growth Equity Club, and Phi Gamma Delta, where I serve as Academic Chair.

06 Currently

Updated September 2026

• Learning — prepayment modeling on agency MBS, and enough time-series econometrics to stop fooling myself with backtests
• Reading — business biographies, mostly. I'm more interested in how operators actually decided things than in the tidy version they tell afterward.
• Building — a cleaner walk-forward testing harness for the trading research, so out-of-sample means something
• Away from a screen — pickup basketball, golf, hiking, producing beats, and keeping an increasingly unreasonable number of houseplants alive

07 Contact

Always glad to talk with people thinking about similar things — especially if you disagree with something above.

• xman@wharton.upenn.edu
• LinkedIn — paste your profile URL here