From Financial News London, January 18:
Three elite City trading shops that shun the limelight are becoming increasingly visible players in the booming world of quantitative finance
Over the past decade, a crop of London-based trading firms has risen from relative obscurity to become millionaire factories for a new generation of maths and science whizzes.
These quantitative analysts, or quants, are shunning careers at places such as Google and Meta for City employers that offer lucrative pay. Suits and ties are out; hoodies and T-shirts are in. Offices boast yoga studios, music spaces, ‘wellness rooms’ and libraries.
Specialised quant trading firms — which often use their own capital to bet on market movements — have no use for the kind of publicity courted by hedge funds eyeing new investors. They closely guard their secrets, sometimes taking legal action to make sure rivals cannot get an edge on sophisticated strategies.
Ballooning profit and high remuneration at three enigmatic companies — Quadrature Capital, G-Research and GSA Capital — have put their inner workings in the spotlight.
“If you think Citadel Securities and Jane Street are tight-lipped, then good luck with those guys,” said an executive at a major European market-maker, referencing the biggest US trading firms. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen them around. They are on the super-secretive end.”
Quadrature, G-Research and GSA declined to comment for this story.
In the green
Quadrature is the youngest of the trio of firms. Former G-Research colleagues Greg Skinner and Suneil Setiya founded the firm in 2010 as a hedge fund but stopped running client money in 2018.
Managing its own investments has paid off. Quadrature calls itself a “growing tech business” and its UK corporate filings show sizable financials: £1.2bn in revenue, pre-tax profit of £554m and a £360m dividend in the year to January 2025. The firm also paid £480m across 173 staff — an average of nearly £2.8m each.
Quadrature doesn’t hand big sums just to its employees, donating £4m to Britain’s Labour Party in the run-up to the 2024 general election. Daniel Luhde-Thompson, a strategic adviser at Quadrature, also donated £250,000 to the party during the election campaign and gave £40,000 to Labour and its MPs last year, official records show.
Filings show Quadrature has funnelled more than $1bn into a climate change charity launched by Skinner and Setiya in 2019, making them some of Britain’s biggest philanthropists. Still, the pair keep a low profile — they are scarcely named and not pictured on Quadrature’s website. The same goes for 33-year-old chief executive Aidan Devane.
Job vacancies are generally not publicised. Quadrature, which has overseas offices in New York and Singapore, instead invites speculative applications “telling us more about what kind of work you’d like to do”.
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Quadrature and other London quant firms have become “significant players”, according to Paul Rowady, founder of trading consultancy Alphacution.
“When you have a smaller firm that cannot just survive but thrive, they’re doing something special, doing something different, and that comes down to technical infrastructure and talent,” Rowady said.
Álvaro Cartea, who leads the University of Oxford’s quantitative finance institute, said most of his students want to work at specialist quant shops. “Their market share has grown a lot,” he said. “Very few people want to go to the traditional banks.”
Oxford postgraduates have gone into trading jobs paying between £250,000 at the “low end” and as much as £800,000, including bonuses, according to Cartea. That could plausibly reach £1m in a few years, he said.
The growth of non-bank trading firms in the wake of the financial crisis has attracted the attention of global regulators. The Financial Conduct Authority is currently reviewing capital requirements for the sector in a bid to boost the UK’s competitiveness.
Cartea said only about 10% of his students move abroad for jobs after university. “They’re attracted by the firms operating in the UK,” he added. “I do believe that despite Brexit, there’s a lot of momentum still in the UK and that we are retaining a great deal of talent.”
De Putron’s powerhouse
Total compensation for G-Research quants in their mid-20s can be as much as £700,000, according to people with knowledge of the matter.
G-Research was set up in 2001 by Peter de Putron, a reclusive financier known for his political connections. No public photographs exist of the Conservative donor, who is listed in corporate filings as a resident of the Cayman Islands. He is the brother-in-law of Ben Leadsom, who formerly served as G-Research’s CEO and is the husband of ex-Tory minister Andrea Leadsom....
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The company in the sidebar, XTX Markets, is building its own billion-dollar data center and was the original story we were going for when the Q and the G and the GSA article popped up.
