Morning Coffee: The "truly kind" trading firm paying $500k+ to juniors. Citi's new tech chief sends intimate emails

Now that Jane Street and its communistic culture seem to have come slightly unravelled in India, where else might you work if you're an excellent mathematician and technologist who wants to make a lot more money than is possible in academia, without the angst of an aggressively commercial culture?

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Hudson River Trading (HRT) is your candidate, or at least it was. Speaking to Matt Levine, Giuseppe Paleologo, the wryly amusing head of quantitative research at hedge fund Balyasny whose gardening leave is over and who is now on a tour of podcasts, said HRT is an unusually fine place to work. 

"There is something in the culture of HRT that is special," declared Paleologo. "It’s collaborative, it’s truly kind. I think it’s a great place to work." 

Paleologo himself worked for HRT between March 2021 and November 2023, at which point he went on another long period of gardening leave. He is a known fan, having already extolled HRT's virtues to FT Alphaville, whom he told that the firm is "collaborative friendly place" where "technologists are true first class citizens."

Speaking to Levine, Paleologo took this track a little further. HRT attracts "the best technological talent I've ever worked with," said Paleologo. It's like a technology firm operating in the financial space and is "fundamentally monolithic". - "You have sharing of ideas and you get to work at the intersection of these ideas."

HRT pays well for these pleasures. In the UK, its average employee earns £500k+ ($680k+). In the US, LevelsFyi says junior software engineers and data professionals are on anything from $500k to $750k with two years' experience. 

It all sounds great. The only downside is that HRT may be less kind and cosy than it used to be. Multiple insiders say the culture there is changing after the departure of founding partner Oaz Nir in January 2025 and the arrival of various new people from Two Sigma. Nonetheless, HRT is understood to be doing very well. There is talk of a record first half in its core markets, and tales of a frozen yogurt party in the New York office to celebrate. 

Separately, Tim Ryan doesn't have an easy job at Citi, but he too seems to be having fun.

Ryan is the man now in charge of Citi's data transformation after Anand (Selva) Selvakesari was gently alleviated of direct responsibility for the project last year. 

Bloomberg reports that Ryan has ADHD and was told at school that he wouldn't come to much. He was a consultant at PWC for 19 years and ran his own business before he joined PWC in 2005. He thinks people wrongly perceive him as a consultant. “The reality is I was a CEO for eight years. I’ve sweat over the balance sheet, delivered sustainable earnings, driven growth, dealt with our own regulatory challenges, had a board," he laments. 

Citi's transformation efforts are so huge that Ryan's back office technology empire encompasses 50,000 people, or more than 20% of Citi's total headcount. He has methods of managing them. Bloomberg says Ryan sends "intimate" weekly emails about moments in his life. Most recently, this included an argument with his wife and spying the new pope. 

If you don't want to work for HRT, you could try Ryan at Citi instead. 

Meanwhile...

The problem with M&A this year is that there are only big deals. In the three months to June 30, the number of deals announced fell to about 10,900. Excluding Q2 2022, when Covid-19 lockdowns caused chaos, this was the lowest since the start of 2015. (Financial Times) 

JPMorgan has shaken up its EMEA ECM business, which is where Vis Raghavan used to work. Virginie de Grivel Nigam has been promoted as head of execution. Ismail Iraqi is leaving for the Moroccan government. (Bloomberg) 

The Indian regulator says that Jane Street's net trading value in the Indian market was about $511mn, more than three times the position of the market’s second largest player. It singlehandedly lifted the BANKNIFTY index by over 1% and used the spike to aggressively sell calls and buy puts. (Financial Times) 

Jane Street needs to hire a lot more compliance professionals and will be less profitable in future. (Rupak Ghose) 

SocGen's average daily trading volumes in spot foreign exchange are up 70%–80% this year. This is better than the wider market. (IFRE)   

If the SEC investigates Harvard over the valuation of its private equity investments, it should investigate private equity as a whole. PE firms are allowed to use their own calculations of net asset value, or NAV, even if they know they're out of date. Worse, they've been buying stakes in private-equity funds at big discounts on the secondary market and marking them up immediately to their stated NAV, resulting in 1,000% increases. These days may be numbered. (WSJ) 

Brevan Howard's Master Fund gained 1.44% in June, narrowing its losses to 0.72% in the first half. (Financial News) 

Cliff Asness at AQR has written a letter about Zohran Mamdani: "Instead of slogans that attack a class he finds it politically expedient to savage, perhaps Mr. Mamdani should focus on his own policies. Doubling down on rent control that economists, near ubiquitously and across political divides, say has destroyed every city it has touched. Coming for low-margin bodegas with city-run grocery stores. Wanting to seize “the means of production,” because, you know, real communism has never been tried."  (WSJ) 

Mark Zuckerberg has been offering AI research talent pay packages of up to $300m over four years, with more than $100m in total compensation for the first year. (NY Mag) 

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