Quant Signal Score

How quantitative is this hiring, really?

Almost every trading firm calls itself quantitative. The Quant Signal Score measures it from what they are actually advertising for.

What is the Quant Signal Score?

The Quant Signal Score is a 0-100 measure of how quantitative an employer's live hiring is, built from four published components: the share of its open vacancies that are core quant roles (up to 50 points), how often it asks for a PhD (20), how many distinct quant role families it is hiring across (20), and the scale of its open book (10). Nothing is subjective and nothing is weighted by reputation. On current vacancies Akuna Capital scores 87, with 82.4% of its 34 open roles in core quant families. A parallel score for skills measures lift: how much more likely a skill is to appear in a quant vacancy than in any other role at the same firms.

Firms scored

Employers with at least five live vacancies

Skills scored

Measured from written requirements

Vacancies behind the scores

1,333

All currently open

Core quant vacancies

828

Classified into a quant role family

The formula

Quant density — 50 points

Share of the firm's live vacancies that classify into a core quant role family: quant researcher, quant trader, quant developer, HFT engineer, ML researcher, quant analyst, portfolio manager or data engineer. A firm where four in five open roles are core quant scores 40 of the 50.

Research depth — 20 points

Share of vacancies that state a PhD requirement or preference, scaled so that 30% or more earns the full 20. This separates firms building research benches from firms hiring mainly production engineers.

Breadth — 20 points

Number of distinct quant role families the firm is hiring across, full marks at six or more. A firm hiring researchers, traders and low-latency engineers at once is running a broader quant operation than one hiring a single family.

Scale — 10 points

Log of the open vacancy count, full marks around 250 live roles. Scale is deliberately the smallest component: a focused 20-person research shop should not be penalised for not being enormous.

Skill scores work differently. For each skill we compute lift — its share of core quant vacancies divided by its share of every other vacancy at the same employers — and map that onto 0-100, saturating at 2.5×. A skill at 100 is at least two and a half times more concentrated in quant hiring than in everything else those firms advertise.

Limits worth stating: the score measures advertised hiring, not headcount, quality or returns. Firms whose boards we do not read are absent, not zero. Senior hiring is systematically under-advertised, so research-heavy firms who hire seniors privately score lower than they would on headcount. See the data and methodology documentation.

Rankings

Quant Signal Score by firm
Firm	Score	Quant density	PhD rate	Role families	Open roles	Confidence
Akuna Capital	87	82.4%	58.8%	6	34	Early signaln=34
Vatic Labs	87	100%	33.3%	4	9	Insufficient datan=9
TransMarket Group	85	100%	57.9%	3	19	Early signaln=19
Flow Traders	82	82.1%	25.6%	5	39	Early signaln=39
Jump Trading	77	81.3%	12.5%	7	96	Early signaln=96
DRW	76	69.3%	18.3%	9	153	Early signaln=153
Virtu Financial	71	79.2%	10.4%	5	48	Early signaln=48
IMC Trading	69	64.5%	11.8%	6	169	Early signaln=169
DV Trading	69	82.7%	1.9%	7	52	Early signaln=52
Point72	67	50.5%	18.2%	9	214	Early signaln=214
Engineers Gate	66	71.4%	28.6%	2	7	Insufficient datan=7
Eclipse Trading	65	77.8%	5.6%	5	18	Early signaln=18
Jane Street	61	63.6%	3.8%	5	184	Early signaln=184
Schonfeld	58	38.7%	17.7%	6	62	Early signaln=62
Old Mission	54	68.8%	6.3%	3	32	Early signaln=32
Squarepoint Capital	52	48.3%	0%	6	89	Early signaln=89
Man Group	51	40.7%	5.6%	6	54	Early signaln=54
AQR Capital Management	32	20.4%	3.7%	4	54	Early signaln=54