Jane Street, Tower & CitSec love French traders. Here's where they get them from

Do you want a career in electronic trading? Well, good for you. A top firm like Jane Street or Citadel Securities pays its people around $2m each on average – there’s a lot to like. The problem is, you’ll need to have an extensive background in quantitative finance. Perhaps even a French background.

Click here to join the bubble by eFinancialCareers, our new anonymous community. ✍️

You see, electronic trading firms love to hire French graduates. French education in mathematics is exceptional – the country has more Fields Medals than any other in the world except the USA.

But while one Grande École in mathematically-dominant France dominates Fields Medals (École normale supérieure), it is not the university that electronic trading firms, when shopping for top quantitative trading talent, go to.

Electronic trading firms run a number of internships. They pay very well; Optiver, for example, pays up to $10k a week to its PhD interns. Ten-week interns. $100k for an internship. Part of the price tag is that electronic trading firms are in competition with a lot of well funded rivals, such as AI companies, for hiring top mathematicians.

We analysed the social media profiles of more than 250 employees, including senior staff, interns and students attending taster days at top electronic trading firms to identify which Grandes Écoles are most popular. The tier list below indicates which these are. Simply put - the higher the tier, the more of its current students and alumni have had some involvement with top trading firms. 

On this basis, École Polytechnique looks like the top school for electronic trading aspirants. It has more alumni in major electronic trading firms than the entire A-tier combined. A veritable list of the industry’s top quants have passed through École Polytechnique’s halls, including David Faucon, a Tower Research Capital partner and CEO of its subsidiary, Latour Trading LLC.

A-tier was also populated by some noteworthy universities – Paris Dauphine, HEC, and École normale supérieure. Alumni from these schools are also very well placed, and include Samy-Adrien Akoum, Citadel Securities’ head of systematic trading for both EMEA and APAC (basically, everything non-Americas). Akoum attended Paris Dauphine for his master’s.

The B-tier involves EDHEC, ESSEC, and Sciences Po. Alumni from this group of universities include Léonard Lancia, former head of European derivatives market making at Citadel Securities and now CEO of high-frequency crypto trading firm Portofino Technologies. Lancia has been in a multi-million dollar dispute with Citadel Securities for some years over his departure from the firm.

The table below is a heatmap. It covers where the largest clusters of Grandes Écoles alumni congregate in electronic trading firms, by firm. The darker the green, the more alumni at that trading firm. For ease of readability, we have omitted tiers D and E. 

Have a confidential story, tip, or comment you’d like to share? Contact: +44 7537 182250 (SMS, WhatsApp or voicemail). Telegram: @SarahButcher. Signal: sarahbutcher.22  Click here to fill in our anonymous form, or email editortips@efinancialcareers.com. 

Bear with us if you leave a comment at the bottom of this article: comments are moderated intermittently 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. You must take sole responsibility for comments you post on this site. We will take reasonable steps to weed out anything that we consider to be offensive or inappropriate.