Quant Trading Firm

The institutions that run the systems this wiki documents. Everything else here is code — banbot, tensortrade, trademaster — built by open-source projects, a university lab, or an individual. The firms with the real books publish nothing, so their shape has to be read off recruiting material: the MIT guide‘s 27-name application list and its per-firm question banks are this wiki’s first look at them.

Three shapes of firm

The list mixes types the guide never explicitly separates, but the roles it names do the separating:

• Proprietary trading firms / market makers — Jane Street, Optiver, SIG, IMC, Jump, DRW, Five Rings, Akuna, Virtu, Flow Traders, Tower Research, Wolverine, Old Mission, Belvedere, Group One. They trade their own capital, and most of them are in the liquidity-provision business, which is why their interviews are pricing games rather than research cases.
• Quantitative hedge funds — Two Sigma, D. E. Shaw, Citadel, Bridgewater, AQR, Point72 (Cubist), Seven Eight Capital. They run outside capital on researched signals; their interviews lean toward open-ended modelling.
• Bank desks and applied-analytics shops — J.P. Morgan (which the guide notes runs an MIT-specific quantitative-research externship), QuantCo. The guide’s QuantCo case is about opera-house attendance, which is data science with a client, not trading.

Hudson River Trading sits across the line by design — the guide lists it under “Algo Developer, SWE,” a prop shop that hires as if it were a software company.

Three roles

The guide’s role labels repeat across firms and describe the same division of labour the wiki’s predict → decide → execute stack implies:

• Quantitative trader (QT) — owns the position and the price. Judgement under uncertainty, on the clock; this is who the market-making games are screening for.
• Quantitative researcher (QR) — finds the signal. Statistics, regression, causal inference; screened by the research case studies.
• Software engineer / algo developer — builds the machinery the other two need. Screened conventionally, with data structures and algorithms.

Citadel Securities is the sharpest illustration: the guide splits its trading roles into systematic (“more CS”) and semi-systematic (“more math”), with a separate fundamental-analyst track — the automation gradient, drawn inside a single firm’s org chart.

What this wiki still can’t see

Nothing here comes from the firms themselves. The list is one student club’s 2022 sense of where to apply, the role names are recruiting-page vocabulary, and the interview content is candidate recall. Firm strategies, capital, technology stacks, and the exchange market-maker programs they operate under are all unsourced — the standing “no independent evidence” problem in synthesis, in its institutional form.

Related

quant-bible-mit-sloan · market-making · quant-interview · algorithmic-trading · synthesis