Is London or New York better for a quant career?

New York concentrates multi-strategy hedge funds, systematic managers and the research arms of the largest proprietary trading firms. Hiring skews toward quantitative research, machine learning and data engineering rather than pure latency work, which sits more heavily in Chicago and Amsterdam. We use New York as the reference point for our own pay index, because firms we track commonly quote other cities relative to it. That is our modelling basis rather than a measured global ranking.

London combines established systematic managers, the European desks of US proprietary firms, and a large bank-side quant population that feeds the buy side. The market is unusually strong in systematic macro and multi-asset systematic strategies. Headline compensation runs below New York in absolute terms, but the gap narrows considerably at senior research and portfolio-manager level where profit share dominates base pay.

The full head to head, including hiring volume, strategy mix and right to work, sits on the comparison page.