Big pay rise at D.E. Shaw in London

If you're a quant who wants to work for a hedge fund, you probably want to work for D.E. Shaw. Heralded as "the first great quant hedge fund," D.E. Shaw launched in above a Marxist bookshop in New York City in the 1980s and came to the UK 13 years ago. D.E. Shaw & Co. (London) LLP just released its results for the year ending March 31st 2019. They suggest you'll be lucky to get a job at D.E. Shaw, but that you'll make good money if you do.

There were only 21 slots for top quant portfolio managers at analysts at D.E. Shaw's London office in the year ending March. This was identical to the year before and reflects the fact that D.E. Shaw is far smaller than the biggest hedge funds like Millennium Management, which has 127 investment staff in London. D.E. Shaw's 21 traders are supported by 25 London administrators.

The world's first quant fund is pretty generous when it comes to paying its people. The average UK employee (admin staff included) earned £614k ($822k) last year, up from £464k the year before. Bonuses at the fund are deferred over three years. 

The highest earning of the fund's three UK partners earned £4.5m, with a further £7.2m shared between the other two. To complicate matters, one of D.E. Shaw's London partners is D.E. Shaw & Co. UK, another listed entity. The other two are Neil Cosgrove, who's worked for the fund in the UK since 2005, and Julius Gaudio, a Harvard economist in his 40s who has his own philanthropic foundation. 

D.E. Shaw & Co (London) made profits of £11.7m on turnover of £65m last year. On its website, the fund says it is, "extensively searching the globe for talented individuals," and hires people who are, "able to think creatively, who are relentlessly rational, and who put ego aside in the interest of getting things right."

The fund says it encourages employees to express the "eclectic parts of their personality." One quant analyst describes it as, "a mixture of grad school and a tech company with a flavor of finance in it."

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