KnowQuant

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 81, with 76.7% of its 30 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

21

Employers with at least five live vacancies

Skills scored

20

Measured from written requirements

Vacancies behind the scores

1,457

All currently open

Core quant vacancies

749

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
FirmScoreQuant densityPhD rateRole familiesOpen rolesConfidence
Akuna Capital
81
76.7%56.7%530Early signaln=30
Tower Research Capital
79
68.4%25.3%695Early signaln=95
TransMarket Group
79
88.2%64.7%317Early signaln=17
Flow Traders
78
67.4%32.6%543Early signaln=43
Engineers Gate
77
80%40%410Early signaln=10
Vatic Labs
77
100%14.3%47Insufficient datan=7
Jump Trading
70
67.8%11.5%687Early signaln=87
DRW
69
59%14.3%9161Early signaln=161
DV Trading
68
65.3%11.1%872Early signaln=72
Virtu Financial
67
67.4%13%546Early signaln=46
IMC Trading
64
53.1%12.3%8162Early signaln=162
Point72
62
40.9%18.1%8193Early signaln=193
Schonfeld
61
40.6%18.8%769Early signaln=69
Eclipse Trading
54
56.3%6.3%516Early signaln=16
Jane Street
50
44.1%3.5%5170Early signaln=170
Squarepoint Capital
49
47.1%0%585Early signaln=85
Man Group
45
27.9%4.4%668Early signaln=68
Clear Street
45
50%0%446Early signaln=46
GSA Capital
35
36.4%9.1%211Early signaln=11
AQR Capital Management
27
7.3%9.1%355Early signaln=55
Capstone Investment Advisors
24
21.4%7.1%114Early signaln=14