Squarepoint Capital
Hello,
What is your opinion on Squarepoint? In particular I am interested how you think about them in comparison to other top quant funds.
It seems to me that the firm is not siloed or pod based like a MM, but people still have responsibility over their own strats and some sort of ability to build up a track record. Do you think Squarepoint might be a good place for someone with 5-10 years experience at a collaborative hedge fund, who wants to get closer to becoming a portfolio manager?
Thanks!
There is virtually no route to becoming a portfolio manager at a place like Squarepoint. Their structure does not work that way. People who strive to become PM, eventually leaves.
Thanks. I know they don't have PMs in the way a MM has. What I mean is whether it would be possible to leverage a position at squarepoint to maybe become a PM somewhere else ? In the sense of building up a track record.
It seems that at squarepoint at least people have ownership of models, which would not really be the case at most quant single manager places I know.
Why don't directly get offers from MM like exoduspoint and millennium？Quite a few people coming from citadel and deshaw got PM seats at those places with large sign on and payout more than 20%(macro->less capital requirement->higher than 20%). The IPs belong to PM and the contract is very attractive. There is no noncompete in millennium and exoduspoint.
Yes, I have heard of people leaving for PM positions elsewhere. The question is why Squarepoint? Wouldn't approaching an MM or a fund with an open PM seat be a more direct way of getting what you want?
Also, I don't know about the "ownership of models" part. The only kind of places that I know which allow such things are the MMs, and usually the IP belongs to the PM and not the researchers. How did you get this impression?
.
Can confirm that they are very intrusive during interviews. I should've followed others' advice and prepared some BS strategies to tell them...
Regardless though, it's a top notch firm and if you're newer to the HF world their relatively collaborative structure is a huge plus.
Famous for a few things:
1. successful performance
2. good pay on junior level (1-3 years experience)
3. under-paying non-partener/non-french;
4. use interviews to fish ideas
5. "Assigning" juniors to top performers to make sure everything works after that guy leaves (hence a few hundred people globally, mostly juniors)
6. No-non compete (delayed bonus, part of the pay is in the employee fund, and try their best to sue everyone who goes to a competitor, so not sure it's a plus)
Just go to glassdoor to read more, all info are from there.
I broadly agree with most of the points you made, but:
- as far as I know bonuses are not really deferred for junior and mid level employees (there may be two or three months between announcement and actual payout, but that's much better than most top quant funds where significant parts of your bonus are deferred over 1 year or even much longer)
- the rumour that Squarepoint tries to sue everyone who leaves seems to be quite persistent in this forum, but I don't think that's true. I personally know several people who worked there, sat out there three months and successfully moved to quant/trading roles at other funds without any legal problems. There was this Sesum case in the US and you can Google it to find out more about it, but I guess nobody here really knows the background of what happened there.
1. delayed bonus was introduced recently so it's natural that you might not know if your info is no updated. Now 50% of the bonus is delayed 6 months and you don't get anything after you leave. In many other places you still get the bonus if you respected your non-compete.
2. for the lawsuits, I know for a fact they try their best to sue, I even know who they did it to and I can tell you most of their competitors are aware of this now (just talk to a few headhunters and bd). Trying their best to sue doesn't mean they will win. Most of these lawsuits end up them offering a settlement while the lawsuit itself is sealed so you don't know anything unless you really know someone. the goal is really to impose firm-specific non competes.
Mostly accurate, and to add to your points since I know that place pretty well
(1) the work setting is very French, as in most people all the way up to senior management literally have meetings and work discussions in French despite there being a substantial non-French workforce, so a massive disadvantage if you don't know the language. This is coming from a person who speaks the language. Doubt they systematically 'underpay non-french' but can definitely see how an environment like that can lead to such a situation
(2) their (non-existent) remote work policy and response to the whole pandemic situation is absolutely abhorent. personally I like being in the office, but I bring this up because it says a lot about Squarepoint management's attitude and treatment of employees.
To give an example: when things were looking pretty scary and government pandemic guidelines were announced, the first thing Squarepoint did was have their legal team go through the official docs and so that they can insist on employees coming into office. Bear in the mind that this is before covid vaccine was even a thing, there were known cases of covid in the office but naturally they were swept under the rug. They say the in-office thing is essential for their 'collaborative team culture' (but then why on earth speak so much French at work) though I suspect management is merely paranoid about intellectual property and their own employees in general.
(3) I agree with the other guy's point on the rumour that Squarement sues everyone who leaves. that's probably blown way out of proportion here in this forum
(4) Performance has been great but bear in mind that their track record isn't that long
(5) 'Collaborative hedge fund' (as mentioned in the original post) I noticed that recruiters like to sell this point when pitching Squarepoint, but I'd definitely be cautious and implications will vary across experience levels. All this really means is that anyone's strategy idea will be shared and worked on by multiple people (which btw is not a bad thing in itself). The trouble begins when you start attributing the resulting PnL as Squarepoint don't do payout formulas and everything is decided on management discretion. If you join as someone relatively experienced and brought good edge from a competitor say, you will very likely be disappointed by your payout (you brought the idea, but you used our resources and we did all the hard work, it's a collaboration). If you are a non-French experienced hire you are almost surely in the worst possible situation, since the moment your ideas are written down it will be out of your hand, translated, discussed and iterated several times by Frenchmen to the point that the idea is not really yours anymore hence justifying the low payout. If you join as someone junior, you are paid less to begin with (you didn't bring the revenue-generating idea) but in general you are happy either out of ignorance, or you get to learn from implementing someone else's ideas.
This explains why they conduct extremely instrusive interviews, it is a free option as they don't have to spend money to hire someone for their ideas. This also explains Squarepoint employee composition - any idiot doing a LinkedIn search will quickly notice that most of the experienced (>4 years) people there are French (typically from 1 or 2 of the French engineering schools and usually spent some time at SocGen or BNP Paribas, we only trust the French from these institutions). More subtle that I haven't seen anyone mention yet is the fact that the juniors are typically Chinese, who tend to get a lot of work done very well, care less about the shenanigans of the French work politics in general.
I think things are even getting worse after you have left. The delayed bonus and modified contract are one of them. More and more lawsuits as well.
For a group of people who's so paranoid of their IP and their own employees, do you really believe they will just let people move to a competitor easily? does it make sense to you? They haven't been too successful on the lawsuit front so that's why the contracts were modified to make it harder to leave. This also depends on the country/region as each country have different laws. Europe law, for example, favors employee's right (think about French employment law) so there tend to be less frivolous allegations in Europe. US and Asia can be very different.
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