Most quantitative trading firms

What are the trading firms with the most quantitative orientation? I'm looking for firms whose core business is building the best models. This as opposed to firms like IMC that focus on having the best infrastructure or flowtraders who focus on marketmaking primarily.

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Based on the most helpful WSO content, some of the firms that are highly quantitative and focus on building the best models include Two Sigma, Citadel, AQR, and Jump. These firms often recruit candidates who have strong backgrounds in STEM fields, particularly math and computer science. They are also known to recruit from the same pool as tech companies like Facebook and Google, indicating a strong emphasis on data analysis and software development.

Sources: Best internships for Quant Trading?, Quantitative Analysis and Probability in Trading (Market Makers, HFT, Quant Firms), Q&A: Top Quant Firms First Year Comp 250k to 400k

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In general, the lower frequency you go the better your models have to be. The faster side of the market has a lot of models that arn't crazy or super creative, because its actually not too challenging to predict movements on shorter horizon, the hard part is monetizing them (where infra comes in). The longer horizon you go, the harder it is to be right but easier it is to monetize through trading. That being said, doing effective research for these models demands amazing data / infra / compute, so its still very important.

 

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