Citadel's new head of equities engineering has an interesting legacy
Not only is hedge fund Citadel hiring equities portfolio managers in London, it's also hiring senior equities technologists in the US. John Fawcett has joined from Robinhood as head of equities engineering.
Although Fawcett spent the past four years at Robinhood, people with keen memories may recall the more distant past, when he ran Quantopian, a quant community platform where quants could share and discuss trade ideas.
Quantopian shut down in 2020, prompting vocal laments from quants who'd been busy developing trading strategies there. When Fawcett founded Quantopian aged 35 in 2013, he was reportedly just a quant with a laptop in a garden shed. The intention was to crowdsource quant finance, allowing quants employed in areas like the oil and gas industry, to develop trading algorithms that would attract funding if successful. Nine years after the launch, though, Fawcett closed the site and concluded that "crowd-sourcing alpha was a moonshot" [which hadn't worked out.]
Citadel appears to be strengthening its equities engineering business. Last year, it hired William Pan from Balyasny as an equities engineering lead. However, there have been departures too. Juan Leon, its director of equities engineering, left in June and is now self-employed.
Have a confidential story, tip, or comment you’d like to share? Contact: +44 7537 182250 (SMS, Whatsapp or voicemail). Telegram: @SarahButcher. Click here to fill in our anonymous form, or email editortips@efinancialcareers.com. Signal also available.
Bear with us if you leave a comment at the bottom of this article: all our comments are moderated by human beings. Sometimes these humans might be asleep, or away from their desks, so it may take a while for your comment to appear. Eventually it will – unless it’s offensive or libellous (in which case it won’t.)
