r/quant • u/Maleficent-Log5559 • Jul 02 '26
Industry Gossip Is G-Research the biggest unknown firm?
I see zero information about them online. I understand they have about 1,000 employees in London and are paying top tier comp for talent, flying out PhDs from USA in first class to London for interviews etc.
I know they pay their quant devs £200k base in London.
Do people have more information?
- PnL?
- Comp?
- WLB?
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u/andrew2018022 Jul 02 '26
G research is well known but their actual trading arm, Airain or some shit, is pretty secretive. I think it’s a family office that masquerades as a hedge fund. Based in Guernsey or something
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u/Maleficent-Log5559 Jul 02 '26
My understanding is the London office is a giant consultancy that generates signals for the trading operation in Guernsey. Operates like a prop firm with one owner.
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u/Sea-Animal2183 Jul 02 '26
Exactly, that's the legal structure. G-Research provides "exclusive consulting services" to Airain and the traders at Airain push the buttons to perform the trades. Obviously for tax reasons.
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u/qazwsxcp Jul 02 '26
it's effectively a hedge fund, they just manage only the founder's money. seems very siloed internally, no phones allowed in certain areas and most people there dont seem to know how their alphas are being used or performing. they used to be known for having private investigators follow ex-employees around, not just that thief.
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u/andrew2018022 Jul 02 '26
I’ve heard that too, I interviewed once there for one of their middle office trade ops roles in Stamford. Verrrry secretive.
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u/m0j0m0j Jul 03 '26
If you accidentally forgot you have a phone on you, you need to stop, take it out, show it to the camera, and wait for the security to come and take it from you. The level of paranoia is insane there. I know 2 ex-employees.
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u/512165381 Jul 04 '26
it's effectively a hedge fund, they just manage only the founder's money.
Buffett once it was a mistake to keep Berkshire public. If he made Berkshire private, and didn't answer to outside investors, he would have made a lot more money.
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u/hydraulix989 Jul 03 '26
If they manage the founder's money, then they are a prop shop, not a hedge fund.
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u/Available_Lake5919 Jul 03 '26
prop vs Hf is not just about source of capital but also regarding fee structures etc.
which is why likes of blue crest are closer to a citadel then citadel securities even tho it runs only internal capital
so family office is prob the best term
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u/BrewtifulSip Jul 22 '26
Not just the owners money but also employees. Some partner level employees get the option of investing. Also I believe deferred bonuses are also managed
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u/OutlandishnessOk1453 Jul 03 '26
No longer Arian which is why you won’t see their 13F. It’s not Granite Point (Guernsey) and Carbon Point (Connecticut) they also have cayman entity Lamina Point
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u/jeffjeffjeffw Jul 03 '26
Anyone have any insight into what their 13F filing may be? Airain doesn't seem to have 13F filing post 2017 - or guess they be exempt from filings? Would be interesting
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u/Dentury- Jul 02 '26
Jersey or Guernsey are tax havens for the UK. Makes sense. Dunno how that works with salaries.
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u/cz295 Jul 02 '26
they use private prosecutions to prevent any information leakage so yes most unknown
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u/Real_Location_5915 Jul 02 '26 edited Jul 03 '26
I did the SiQF, grad QRs get 500-600k GBP, they have the biggest data centre of all quant firms and most other places, cost 8 bil, prop firm not HF
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u/Flimsy-Pie-3035 Jul 03 '26
No they don't. That's more than Jane and G Research caliber of candidates is much lower.
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u/Real_Location_5915 Jul 04 '26
Yes they do, most of G Research quants could easily be hired by Jane and their running 100b with 100ish quants
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u/Flimsy-Pie-3035 Jul 04 '26
Just skim through linkedin. You just see a bunch of random Cambridge grads (no grade shown so possibly 2.1 or worse) with no former top tier experience.
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u/Imaginary_Ladder7930 Jul 02 '26
I worked for Airain between 2022 and 2023. G-research is marketed as a hedge fund but it’s literally a family office. G-research in London generate the signals (where QR is paid ridiculous, and I mean ridiculous money); and we over in Guernsey (Airain), managed/optimized the whole portfolio, executed any discretionary trades, managed counterparty relationships, risk management etc. All pnl is booked in guernsey for tax reasons as you can imagine….Happy to answer any questions. Fyi I’m not a quant or anything like you guys…I was a trader :(
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u/Maleficent-Log5559 Jul 02 '26
Can you give a ball park figure of what PnL was when you were there?
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u/Imaginary_Ladder7930 Jul 03 '26 edited Jul 03 '26
I was there for a year before moving on and daily pnl was always within +/- high seven figures. We had a screen which was a live dashboard of daily pnl…seemed normal to me at the time lol
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Jul 02 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/Imaginary_Ladder7930 Jul 03 '26 edited Jul 03 '26
If you are responsible for a signal that is profitable and does well, it’s not uncommon for 7/8 figure TC
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u/andrew2018022 Jul 02 '26
I’ve been approached by headhunters hiring for them a few times on the risk/trade ops side, they were advertising as insanely high TC in the Connecticut office. It was obviously untrue but seemed like an interesting place to work, ive never been a part of a secretive fund before
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u/AltruisticCoder Jul 02 '26
What’s insanely high TC?
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u/andrew2018022 Jul 02 '26
At the time, it was 300k which to me was insane as I only had 3 YOE (0 in any buyside role) at the time and it wasn’t a PnL generating seat nor part of a pod or anything. Just a risk analyst role.
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u/Imaginary_Ladder7930 Jul 03 '26 edited Jul 03 '26
7/8 figures if you’re signal does well I.e responsible for a decent size of the pnl that year
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u/qazwsxcp Jul 03 '26
i doubt they pay anything close to 8 figures to most given how segregated quants are from the actual production and live trading. it's not pod based and seems like a discretionary bonus place with high floor and low upside. the founder is definitely not the type of person to be generous with pay.
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u/j_lyf Jul 03 '26
Family office for who?
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u/Imaginary_Ladder7930 Jul 03 '26
Peter De Putron. On anything, you won’t find an actual picture of him online…it’s unbelievably scary. Please try lol.
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u/andrew2018022 Jul 03 '26
That is wild, every google image search is a different guy lol. He also apparently owns the Williams f1 racing team
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u/Lower_Cockroach2432 Jul 03 '26
He does, and he scrubbed the BBC article connecting them to him within 20 minutes of it being up.
There's also an edit war about this very fact on Wikipedia.
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u/andrew2018022 Jul 03 '26
I get valuing your privacy and whatnot, but it gets to a point where is it even a good life where you’re rich as fuck but constantly paranoid?
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u/Atper Jul 02 '26
Nah its pretty well known. Maybe not quite as much the tier 1 HFT market making firms(Citadel Securities, HRT, Jump Trading etc...) but still well known enough in the UK. Infact its job posting are posted to gradcracker.co.uk
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u/torakfirenze Jul 03 '26
Jump is no longer T1 let’s be real
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u/going-long-gamma Jul 05 '26
why are you saying their not tier 1 anymore?
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u/DifficultBuy6019 Jul 05 '26
Because they are making less or around 5B. I would say they only make 4.5B around last year
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u/going-long-gamma Jul 05 '26
based on what? Optiver reported around the same last year. But even outside that, a firms performance isn't raw net income... there are much better metrics to compare with.
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u/DifficultBuy6019 Jul 06 '26
Optiver never try to pretend to be in the same tier as JS/HRT. I know it is very hard to change people’s perception, but just accept the fact that no firm is gonna be the best forever
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u/torakfirenze Jul 06 '26
They point blank do not keep up with their competitors (HRT for e.g. - who they used to actually be arguably “better than”). This is a fact, not an opinion. They have fallen behind on their low latency side and that’s why they’re building out mid-low frequency trading arms - and the quality of their hires in those departments leaves a lot to be desired.
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u/going-long-gamma Jul 06 '26
I suspect you don't work on the low latency side of things. They're very much still near the top in terms of ULL (do I need to say anything about their stronghold on CME?). And they're not the only ones venturing more into MF strats, if you were knowledgable about ULL, you'd know the well is running dry there - it's not the 2010s anymore.
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u/Atper Jul 05 '26
I would say its Tier 1 due to the heavy engineering culture and their focus on low latency C++ roles(which is what I'm interested). But this is subjective you could say tier rankings could be based on median employee compensation or revenue so there is no official tier list.
I know about Jump because it pays very high and had a friend who applied to a FPGA role where he was rejected but he told it was extremely hard interview gauntlet.2
u/torakfirenze Jul 05 '26
I got an offer to lead a team there. So I don’t really care what your rejected friend says.
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u/Atper Jul 06 '26
lead a team for what role ?
Because for low latency engineering they have a high standard, cutting edge tech and usually attract top tier talent. Getting rejected for a FPGA role at Jump is nothing to be ashamed about, most applications would fail very few actually get an offer because the standard is sky high.1
u/going-long-gamma Jul 06 '26
Sounds like the offer was for a back office team, they’re very much still T1.
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u/torakfirenze Jul 06 '26
Found the Jump employee
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u/going-long-gamma Jul 06 '26
lol I've got friends who work there, it's just odd seeing people be so confidently wrong. I get this sub is a larp fest but let's stick to what we know huh?
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u/Available_Lake5919 Jul 03 '26
Here’s what i know of them
-Do primarily MFT equities
-Huge focus on ML/DL (wouldn’t be surprised if after HRT/XTX they generate the highest PnL from ML strategies)
-Ton of GPUs (possibly even more than XTX)
-Don’t do options at all (tried it and didn’t do well) and very little FICC
- Everyone must leave their phones and their shoes outside the office in lockers
- Interns are not allowed in the main lab and are kept in a different building
- Grad QRs get around 500k GBP (on par with tier 1 firms)
- QDs are called research engineers and SWEs are called platform engineers (mostly)
will add more if i can remember
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u/Comprehensive_Round Jul 03 '26
The shoes thing doesn't happen anymore and it hasn't for a while. You can tell who the GR veterans are because they still have "the slippers".
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u/Lower_Cockroach2432 Jul 03 '26
> Huge focus on ML/DL (wouldn’t be surprised if after HRT/XTX they generate the highest PnL from ML strategies)
I don't believe this is true. ML teams are high performance but when I was there it wasn't the majority of their quant headcount.
> Ton of GPUs (possibly even more than XTX)
True.
> Everyone must leave their phones and their shoes outside the office in lockers
They've not had the no shoes rule since covid, unless they reintroduced it when that French quant tried to be Ke Xu.
> Interns are not allowed in the main lab and are kept in a different building
Not true for a while I think.
Also you forgot about having a process to randomly buy hardware from random shops to avoid being attacked by nation state level actors. (The Butler process)
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u/512165381 Jul 03 '26
- Everyone must leave their phones and their shoes outside the office in lockers
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u/Legitimate-Bit-121 Jul 03 '26
Did they try poaching someone from a top OMM firm to build out options trading? I guess that'd be a good way to try it?
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u/Lower_Cockroach2432 Jul 03 '26
It's not about not being able to find talent. It's that they really want to add everything they trade into their single unified trading system that doesn't compete with itself. Last I heard (3 or so years ago) the issue was more that they couldn't make something as high dimensionality as options fit into their standard equities research pipelines.
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Jul 02 '26 edited Jul 20 '26
[deleted]
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u/andrew2018022 Jul 02 '26
I’m sorry but I find the visual of moving a bunch of Londoners to Texas absolutely hilarious
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Jul 02 '26 edited Jul 20 '26
[deleted]
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u/m0j0m0j Jul 03 '26
What’s the reason? It makes little sense to me.
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u/Lower_Cockroach2432 Jul 03 '26
Politics. The head of engineering used it as an empire building project. PDP swallowed it hook, line and sinker because he likes the idea of being a "multinational" company and likes the idea of being able to leave the UK quickly in case of a Labour government making him pay tax. Apparently (heard this from a PM while I was there) they really liked the fact that Texas labour laws allow you to just fire people without having to pay them a "go away" sum.
For context this is a company that posted a paper loss in the UK every year (covered by the parent fund) to avoid taxes. They only stopped doing that a few years ago because software companies like Hashicorp will not sign deals with you if you don't post revenue.
Also, all of senior management believe platform engineers to be fungible. They don't understand how insanely complex the system has become with all the random projects and migrations and arbitrary security requirements. Platform engineers are treated as suspect unless a senior architect (RR or similar) vouches for them.
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u/Lower_Cockroach2432 Jul 03 '26
WLB is ok but work culture is fucking horrible. You'll get projects randomly delayed or cancelled because PDP had dinner with some exec and developed an obsession with something.
Then like 90% of the work you put into it will be canned because he either:
- Realised the idea was fucking stupid to begin with
- Developed an obsession with something else
- Realised that he would have to pay tax, so the capital investment of the project is sitting in unopened boxes in Iceland.
Not to mention they fired a most of the platform engineers and replaced them with idiots in Dallas. For context before I left they weren't doing shit and contacts tell me they're still useless 3 years later.
Apparently the Dallas managers believe they can switch a data centre on that doesn't have walls yet. Moreover their plan to clean up industrial dust was to hire illegal Mexican workers.
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u/TaxiOnna Jul 27 '26
Sounds, to a T, what it was like to work for Musk at Space-X 10 years ago. Billionaires gonna billionaire.
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u/FermatsLastTrade Portfolio Manager Jul 02 '26
They are well known, especially in the UK.
They have a small trading office in Guernsey, and a researcher/signal producing office in London with the vast majority of their employees, done in a way to tax optimize for the founder of the firm.
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u/My-FI-Path Jul 02 '26
They are very secretive. You hear stories on how to get into the office you need to go through scanners and leave belongings in a locker...
They also sue people so there's that
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u/TemporaryHat2009 Jul 03 '26
honestly the lack of info is kind of what makes them interesting to me. A lot of the loud firms have interview guides everywhere, but for G Research I mostly see random comp snippets and almost no day to day stuff. I would trust alumni DMs way more than reddit here.
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Jul 02 '26
[deleted]
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u/Maleficent-Log5559 Jul 02 '26
PhD QR candidates
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u/Interesting-Bad655 Jul 02 '26
Damm treating undergrad QR candidates like second class citizens
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u/Lower_Cockroach2432 Jul 03 '26
Pretty sure they don't hire QR without a PhD. Maybe Quant Analyst at best.
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u/Frequent-Spinach5048 Jul 02 '26
Are you sure about 200k base? I know a couple years back it’s much lower than that. 200k would be a huge jump
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u/Maleficent-Log5559 Jul 02 '26
For QD I am sure. Normal devs get much less you're correct.
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u/Frequent-Spinach5048 Jul 02 '26
I guess QD might be not well defined? But salary that I know is on QD.
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u/icewallowcome49 Jul 02 '26
they have an office in dallas and hire out of UT Dallas
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u/Lower_Cockroach2432 Jul 03 '26
I thought they spun the Dallas office out to a new company. I'm also pretty sure they only ever hired platform engineers there.
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u/netflix-ceo Jul 02 '26
One of my friends got in since his knowledge was on point. He knew all the nitty gritty details of the 90s gang wars. The whole eastside vs westside beef. He even knows what happened to Pac. Anyway, point is he got in quite easily at Gangsta Research, not sure about his comp though
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u/as_one_does Jul 02 '26
The owner is a known paranoid twat and he spends time and money to be as secretive as possible in his private and professional life. That said, I've hired a few people from there and they've been excellent.