I've always wondered how these high HFT comp numbers work, like people making $1m out of school. How many people are in HFT, how many make that, and what is the highest you've heard of? Is it based on some sort of profit sharing and what is a typical percentage?
Who makes 1m$ out of school?
No one makes $1m out of school. Highest I’ve seen have been Jane Street / Hudson River Trading / Citadel / Jump, all around 250-325 including signing bonus. There are a few really small more secretive firms made up of high performing traders/devs who left other firms that may pay more but I haven’t seen any of them hire new grads. Firms usually have around 80-1500 employees. HFT is usually only one of many revenue streams of a trading firm. Different firms focus on different efforts. Depends on the firm, but usually traders are the ones making the real money. That said there also way fewer traders than devs and their job security and exit options are a lot shittier. If you want to learn more about trading refer to this blogpost: https://blog.headlandstech.com/2017/08/03/quantitative-trading-summary/
Does pay go up a ton with experience? Does the winner of the international math Olympiad get offers for $10 million a year at a quant job?
Depends on the firm. Some firms reward uhh.. entrepreneurship I guess you can call it more than others. Being an IOI medalist will help you get a quant job but nothing will guarantee high pay like high performance. And trading is kinda funny / cool in that the smartest person isn’t always going to be the best performer . Also I may be wrong about this because I don’t have a good idea of what quants really get paid across the industry or what their noncompetes look like but I think on average the best traders make more than the best quants. But again depends on the firm. Someone who knows better please chime in.
300K+ out of school. You either do well enough to see your TC grow > 10% per year or be fired.
How many years can you stay in before it levels out as an IC?
What’s tech debt like in Citadel? Generally okay across the board? What’s the variance like given your size?
HFT as in high frequency trading? Its pretty much a hedge fund but with algo instead of people. Nobody makes 1 mil in hft out of school just like how nobody runs a hedge fund right out of school. The only fund that comes close to the kind of TC that you’re talking about is medallion fund by Jim Simon but no one knows anything about it.
Are quants better paid? How high do they go?
HFT firms often run market making businesses, so very different from hedge funds. Some companies like Citadel run both, but the market making part and the hedge fund part are legally required to be separated from each other.
Had two offers at hedge funds, one fresh out of school was 150k base, 25k sign on, 25-75k first year bonus. Got another offer two years of experience at 150 an hour with the expectation of working 50-60 hours a week. Expected yearly comp of the contract was 350k-400k. Long hours. Was told sky was the limit for compensation, but in all reality I would make 650k all in when hired in as an employee. This place offered high payed contracts til you proved yourself. Extremely hard to get a full time offer Interesting thing was I was really inexperienced, had literally two years experience. Most tech employees were veterans from two sigma, de Shaw, and tower research. They mostly hired through their network, never hired anyone full time who couldn’t be personally vouched for by staff
For some reason I was under the impression there was conditional pay. You describe it like a guaranteed bonus.
Which place?
Some places do guarantee a bonus
TC or GTFO
1000%, dude saved the company