JPMorgan hired a Hudson River Trading quant as a credit trading MD
It's a rare sight for someone to leave an electronic trading firm like Jane Street or Citadel Securities to join a bank. It does happen though, and Steve Cho is the most recent example. After spending five years at Hudson River Trading (HRT), he left to join JPMorgan last month.
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Cho joined the bank as an MD in credit trading. At HRT he was an algo developer (their term for a quant trader), and an algorithmic credit trading lead. His LinkedIn states that he worked on long/short market neutral strategies for bonds and derivatives, while also employing some fundamental analysis.
Most people that leave a prop firm for a bank are banking alums and Cho is no exception. He joined Barclays' electronic credit market making team as a PhD graduate before being swiftly poached by Citadel to become a portfolio manager. He spent one year at the former and six at the latter before joining HRT.
Other HRT alums working in banks today spent far longer in banking before they left in the first place. Douglas Borden, who joined JPMorgan's execution team in 2024, had already made MD at Goldman Sachs before joining the HFT industry with now-defunct KCG Holdings. Antoine Savine, HRT's ex-head of macro analytics that joined Barclays last year, was previously head of quant research at BNP Paribas. By that standard, Cho is a relative newcomer to banking.
It's not clear what stood out about a return to banking, but Cho may have felt kinship with JPMorgan over its affinity for letting their staff burn through AI tokens. At the bank, middle-office staff have reportedly used AI tokens equivalent to more than their annual salary while, at HRT, employees spend upwards of $1k a day on AI.
JPMorgan declined to comment, while HRT did not respond to a comment request.
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