28-year-old analyst disappointed by $600k bonus

When is a big bonus not big enough? When you’re a prodigious 28-year-old quantitative hedge fund analyst who thought you were deserving of $1.7m.

This is the sorry story of Ke Xu, a Chinese national who spent six years working for Goldman Sachs in London after achieving a first class degree at Cambridge. In 2012, Xu quit Goldman for Trenchant, a hedge fund at which he thought he was in line for a seven-figure bonus.

Upon receiving a mere £622k for his efforts, Xu lined up a new job at Cubist Systematic in Hong Kong. Before leaving, he also accessed restricted files at Trenchant and copied a few of them. For this, he has now been sentenced to four years in prison.

A LinkedIn profile belonging to one Ke Xu who was educated at Cambridge and worked for Goldman describes him as a, “dude,” with skills in investment banking and ‘bread and butter making’. This looks unfortunate, in retrospect.

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