About
Founder, Constellation Stocks
New Jersey, USA
Constellation Stocks is built on one idea: a retail trader can be profitable when decisions come from understanding how businesses and financial markets work, not from tips or signals.
I am Iskandar (Iskan) Rakhmatov. For fifteen years my work has been building financial models that help people make decisions. Constellation Stocks applies that work to equity options: a framework I built, tested with my own capital, and share in public, results included.
This is how the project came to be.
It started with my mother's investments
In the early 1990s, private business was just beginning in my home country. My mother started lending her own money to private companies and helping entrepreneurs raise capital from others. As a teenager I spent a lot of time around those businesses: bakeries, textile makers, retailers. I listened to merchants talk about margins, suppliers and cash, and I learned that behind every business there is a set of numbers that tells you whether it works.
That was when I discovered my interest in finance. It is why I chose economics at university, and I went on to earn a Master's degree in Economics.
Fifteen years inside companies
Over a fifteen year career I worked in corporate finance, private equity and business strategy, and reached management roles in each. My work took me across three regions: the CIS, the Middle East and North Africa, and North America.
That work taught me how the corporate world really runs: how companies make money, how management thinks, and what has to happen for value to show up in the numbers. It is the foundation of everything I do in markets today.
In 2022 I started building AI driven equity research tools. In 2024 the project was accepted into in5 Tech, the Dubai startup incubator launched by TECOM Group, and GCC Business News covered it in 2026. That work shaped how I research companies today: faster, wider, and always tied back to the numbers.
While I was building the startup in Dubai, a U.S. startup offered to bring the project to the American market. I accepted and moved to the United States. Since October 2024 I have been Chief Operations Officer of Zeus Quanto Corp in New Jersey, where I lead the company's operations, and I share my work in public here.
In 2024 Bell Invest, a professional investment publication, published my three part series on equity options: "How Modern Options Work", "Directional Trading and Risk Hedging: Which Options Strategies Are Suitable" and "How to Analyze Company Stocks for Options Trading".
In January 2026 I was admitted to MicroCapClub, a vetted community of microcap investors where membership is granted only by a vote of existing members.
From models to markets
For most of my career I had one goal: to earn my living from my own expertise and interests. Few careers offer that kind of independence. A salary depends on someone else's decisions.
So, as an individual trader and investor, I tried almost everything: intraday trading, swing trading, private lending, structured notes, IPO investing, algorithmic trading, and some trading that was closer to voodoo than analysis. Each taught me something. Most of them did not fit. Equity options did. They let me turn a view on a business into a position with defined risk, and they reward the kind of company analysis I had been doing my whole career.
I do not see myself as a pure trader. I am a methodologist. I build the model, test it with real money, and publish what it produces, the good months and the bad ones.
The strategy is simple to describe and hard to execute. I analyze the businesses of public companies, then build a book of long and short positions that fits the current macro environment, and structure each idea with options.
The 2025 record
In January 2025 I started running this long/short equity options strategy with my own capital, and I publish every month on the Track Record page, including the losing ones.
In 2025 the strategy returned 97.71%, verified by a U.S. licensed CPA.
The year also included a 20.34% drawdown and three losing months. They taught me more than the gains, and I rebuilt my risk rules around them: cap risk per trade no matter how good the last month was, keep capital in reserve, and add size only to trades that have proven themselves. Those rules are now part of the Method.
What practitioners say
"Fundamental stock pickers and options specialists have long operated as separate camps, and his framework connects the two disciplines in a transferable form."
Jefferson Gramm, Portfolio Manager, Bandera Partners; Adjunct Professor, Columbia Business School
"Most equity analysts lack the sophistication to express theses through options structures, and most options traders lack deep qualitative research capabilities. Mr. Rakhmatov combines both."
Adil Togayev, Founder and Chief Investment Officer, Aspan Capital
"His approach of identifying fundamentally driven catalysts and expressing those views through options structures is something I find particularly compelling, as it combines deep equity research with disciplined risk management in a way that very few practitioners execute well."
Sergio Heiber, Founder, Microcap Opportunities; Seeking Alpha analyst
"Integrating fundamental catalysts with options-market-structure analysis in a disciplined, rules based system is technically demanding and uncommon among market participants."
Dan Pines, Managing Partner and Co-founder, Qualiteq Capital
"This framework has provided myself and other investment professionals with significant insight into how options market mechanics could be used as an additional structuring layer in traditional fundamentally driven investing."
Tom Bachrach, CFA, Founder and Principal, PFH Capital
"This is the documentation discipline associated with professional production research, and it is uncommon among individual practitioners."
David Ptashny, CFA, FRM, former Head of Statistical Arbitrage, CIBC World Markets
"The hallmark of Mr. Rakhmatov's work is that his contributions are not only notable within his institution, but also repeatable, transferable, and adaptable to new environments."
Viacheslav Romanov, Partner, Boston Consulting Group
Why I teach the method, not the signal
Most trading products sell signals: buy this, sell that. I do not. No live calls, no trade alerts.
A signal helps you once. A process helps you every time. The Constellation Method is the eight step process behind the track record: how a thesis becomes an options trade, how the structure fits the catalyst, and how the maximum loss is set before entry.
I believe a trading practice can become a real profession, not a hobby and not a gamble. But it takes years of skill, capital and discipline, so it is not a full time job for a beginner. Teaching the practice is how I help people build toward it, step by step.
What you will find here
- The Method: the eight step framework, with a free walkthrough call if you want to go deeper.
- The Track Record: every month since January 2025, with the CPA verification.
- The Blog: methodology, real trade walkthroughs, and live experiments like the wheel strategy test, reported either way.
Quick facts
- Founder: Iskandar (Iskan) Rakhmatov
- Based in: New Jersey, USA
- Role: financial modeler and options methodologist
- Background: fifteen years in corporate finance, private equity and business strategy across the CIS, MENA and North America
- Research: AI driven equity research since 2022, accepted into the in5 Tech incubator in Dubai in 2024
- Position: Chief Operations Officer, Zeus Quanto Corp
- Publications: three part series on equity options, Bell Invest, 2024
- Education: Master's degree in Economics
- Communities: MicroCapClub member since January 2026; Stock Ideas Group member
- Strategy: long/short equity options, own capital, since January 2025
- Verification: calendar year returns attested by a U.S. licensed CPA under AICPA AT-C Section 215
- Company: Constellation Stocks is operated by Zeus Quanto Corp, a New Jersey corporation
Find me on X, LinkedIn and YouTube, or write through the contact page.
Educational content only. Not investment advice. Past performance does not predict future results. See the Disclaimer.