Ex-Citadel quant star is charging himself out for $3k a day

Remember Jeffrey Ryan? He's the former quantitative analyst at Citadel who left after seven years in June 2019. Ryan's Citadel non-compete is finally over, but Ryan hasn't resurfaced at - say - Point72 as might have been expected.

Instead, Ryan has ventured out on his own. He's founded a new 'quant consulting company' called Quant at Large, which helps independent investors and fund manages get to grips with all the paraphernalia of quant trading, from software, algos, and statistics, to data pipelines, analysis tools, alpha research, computational resources, risk and performance tools, programming languages.

Among other things, Quant at Large offers a 'One Day Quant' package for $3k, which helps organizations establish what they want from a quantitative finance strategy and what they need to achieve it. The One Day Quant includes a 90-minute video interview with Ryan himself. "The goal is to let me understand your current state and how you can add systematic components," says Ryan on his web page explaining the product. 

It's not clear whether Ryan will do all the work at Quant at Large, but for the moment he appears to be the only employee. If Ryan himself is indeed the quant in the One Day Quant offering, it seems like a very good deal. - As Ryan points out in his bio, he's spent two decades working in quantitative finance. He joined Citadel's quant strategies desk in 2013 as it was only just starting out, and during his time at the fund he helped build tools around "data processing, alpha validation, risk management and high performance computing."

Some of you will be aware that Ryan isn't just known for his work transforming Citadel's quant trading business into one of "the most successful quant teams in the world." He's also one of the best known programmers in R, and organizes the R/inFinance conference in Chicago each year.

Ryan said he's set up Quant at Large in order to apply the principles of open source software to quant finance. "There is a lot of great information out there," says Ryan. "It shouldn't be necessary for new quant trading firms or existing desk adopting systematic processes to keep "reinventing the wheel for core components."

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