Not mentioning the legendary TGS which is now no longer under the radar, what are some other names that come to your mind?
To start off: Radix, Vatic (which seems to have made a come back), Aquatic and Evergreen Statistical (very new but seem interesting).
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Hi neiji, hope I can help. Do any of these links cover what you're looking for:
More suggestions...
If those topics were completely useless, don't blame me, blame my programmers...
Vatic I think is still not super great. Evergreen Stat just started up, but it seems like they are already interviewing people from Stanford. I contacted them for a role but they require candidates to be well versed in both SWE and Quant (i.e good at infra, C++, python, AND also good at ml/ai/stats/prob).
Radix isn't super under the radar anymore, I'd put it in the same tier as Headlands/Aquatic/Ansatz as firms that everyone probably knows, but they still have a relatively low headcount.
The issue is a lot of niche firms probably have minimal to no online presence. These are probably the people on linkedin who have "{Role} at trading firm", "{Role} at undisclosed financial firm", etc. or something similar (or they probably aren't on linkedin at all). Trust me, I've also searched a bunch for more niche places and I think this is an issue of "unknown unknowns".
However, there are several lists online that I think are pretty comprehensive: ex: https://www.wallstreetoasis.com/forum/hedge-fund/small-quant-hfs-from-pe, but imo I think most of these super small firms aren't that great and its hard to verify whether or not they are really any better than something like JS, Jump, CS, or HRT. Its pretty rare to find a small firm that actually has talent and performs well like Radix or Headlands vs a bunch of small but meh firms like Sunrise Futures, 3Red, HAP, etc.
Quant is an area where I don't understand how smaller and newer shops can compete with established players at all. Before you can make even one successful top-notch strategy, you need so much infrastructure and data and that takes years to build. Everyone at Citadel complained about technology like the back-testing system being old, and yes, it was; but on the other hand, *it existed at all* and years of revision had added support for all the real-world corner cases that you'd initially miss if you wrote your own system (like stocks halted for limit-up/limit-down, spin-offs, temporary short-selling restrictions from 2008, etc). I've also worked at smaller shops where all that stuff wasn't yet built, and the lack of tools made it impossible to build world-class models.
It's easy to import daily stock data from yahoo and do some python linear regressions and think you can turn that into a quant fund. But you have to remember that if it's easy for you to do on your startup budget, then the established big quant shops have already reviewed it plus fifty variations.
what you're saying definitely makes some sense to me, however I think of it more as a startup vs big tech type of thing (obviously it's not completely apples-to-apples but I think there's still a valid comparison to be made). Why can't [insert $10bn+ tech company] compete against [emerging growth-stage tech startup with 100 employees] in [a specific product]?
a) on the engineering side, there is such thing as "10x employees" or even "100x employees". a team of 10 rockstar swes in a month can build a system/tech infra that rivals what an entire org at google or meta could build in a year, at a fraction of a cost and probably 95% of the quality
b) there's always a niche in the market that a smaller fund can specialize in and exploit, which may not be scalable for a bigger fund like Citadel or MLP, and not worth the investment/effort/risk of developing the technical infra for
I only have surface level experience across tech and quant, so would love to know if anyone agrees or has differing opinions
I'd counter with these points:
1) "10x or 100x engineers can build a system to rival google" -- maybe if you can find them and afford them. But citadel and google (plus lots of other companies) want to hire all the good 100x engineers too, and they can pay WAY more than you can since your startup fund doesn't have much revenue yet and no one has ever heard of you. How will you get those 100x engineers to even *find out you exist at all*, let alone convince them to interview with you, let alone work for you? And by the way, Citadel's talent level is crazy-smart, they already have a bunch of 100x engineers, so you still won't have any advantage over them. :-)
2) "there's a niche that smaller funds can exploit that's not scalable for a Citadel or MLP" -- Not really. Citadel has many individual traders, and some of them have small books of only a few million. IE, that individual trader is the same size as your startup, so it's worth his time to pursue those small opportunities just like you. Except he can leverage Citadel's existing infrastructure -- if he wants to research an idea that requires ten years of level-two tick-level price data from the brazilian futures market plus a compute infrastructure that's optimized for reading that much data plus a back-tester for estimating not only the PNL of his idea but also market impact of his trading, then Citadel already has that and he'll get access to it the same day. How will you find time to research those trading ideas if you have to spend your time building out your back-test system instead?
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