There is a $500m quant fund run by AI that might want to hire you
What is the preeminent example of a quantitative hedge fund, also known as a quant fund? You might very well think it is Renaissance Technologies, or perhaps something like D.E. Shaw. And you might very well be wrong.
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Last week, a little-known hedge fund called Numerai raised an additional $30m in a Series C funding round, bringing its total assets under management to $550m. This funding round was led by “top university endowments”, in Numerai’s own words. Previous investors include Paul Tudor Jones, founder of Tudor Capital.
Numerai is not exactly a traditional hedge fund. It was founded in 2015 by Richard Craib, then working as a data scientist at asset management firm Prudential, in Cape Town and doesn't have the standard array of analysts and portfolio managers.
Instead, it has around 30,000 data scientists contributing to its machine learning models. They do so in return for a cryptocurrency called “Numeraire”. They bet Numeraire on their next model being more successful than the previous one, and are paid more Numeraire if it is. Numeraire can be traded for Bitcoin, US dollars, or any other currency – it’s listed on Binance and Coinbase.
Despite walking like a startup and talking like a startup, Numerai has some real finance experts among its ranks. Senior quantitative developer Daniel Vassilev, who joined in September this year, came from multi-strategy fund Brevan Howard. Quant developer Thomas Su joined in September as a trading engineer from ExodusPoint. And the firm’s President and COO, Dan Spier, was once upon a time head of portfolio trading for now-defunct hedge fund Standard Pacific Capital.
If you’re interested in working at this quasi-quant fund, it only has three jobs open, all based in San Francisco, where its only office is. One is for an office & marketing coordinator, but two are for quant-y roles: a “quantitative AI researcher” and a quantitative engineer. Pay is around $280k - $350k and $250k - $330k, respectively.
Across 2024, Numerai claims that it delivered returns of 25%. If that number is correct, it would be the highest-returning “quant” fund in the world, according to Bloomberg – in second place would be Marshall Wace’s MN TOPS, which returned 22.6%. It is however possible that some private funds, such as Rentec’s Medallion Fund, beat that. Numerai only returned around 8% so far this year, however.
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