Never heard about any major layoff from quant firms and market-makers (Citadel, Akuna, Jump, Optiver, Jane Street). Are these firms basically recession-proof due to the higher barrier of entry (average employees have PHD in quantitative subjects)?
Just curious as someone outside of the industry. Which firm is still aggressively hiring in such low-growth environment?
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Majority of quant strategies profit off market volatility. Recession -> volatile market -> good times for quants. Also, top quant funds are AWLAYS doing layoff to get rid of non-profit-making quants. Cutting people is their quarterly routine. It's not on the news because quant funds are too small.
Also cmon the average employees don’t have PhDs. Every firm you just listed hires out of undergrad
Oh, Citadel definitely does layoff. They're famous for it. The cliche when I was there was "Citadel pays better than anyone else on the street, but the catch is you spend every single day thinking you'll be fired tomorrow." The layoffs do tend to be more targeted than big tech, though. Citadel never did "we must layoff X% of the company due to a recession." It was always about targeting perceived underperformers, or sometimes shutting down an entire desk that wasn't making enough money.
As for the second part of your question about whether quant firms are recession-proof...not exactly, but a traditional stock market crash tends to be profitable for quant firms.
Common knowledge that turnover exists in hedge funds because people get fired for not delivering.
These firms won't fire people until they underperform/stop making money. Even if the world explodes, as long as money is being made they won't touch you.
People get canned from MMHFs all the time. The median tenure for fundamental PMs at platforms is less than a year. The layoffs are just totally unrelated to the performance of the general economy. You can have booms in energy trading when there’s a huge recession fear. You can have a giant stock market boom while entire quant pods get cut from a reallocation of capital between desks. Zero correlation but still high turnover
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