How much experience do staff at electronic trading firms really have? Jane Street, HRT and more
Quant trading firms like Jane Street have a reputation for hiring and developing young staff, but the top firms have been doing that for decades. How much do the young guns actually dominate these trading firms today?
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We've endeavoured to find out by analyzing the FINRA BrokerCheck profiles of personnel registered with the various entities of major electronic trading firms. We looked at 3,771 registered personnel across seven major firms, looking at how many years of financial services experience each company's employees have on average. This covers a range of functions, including securities traders, operations professionals and client-facing roles. However, the data does not include most engineers, nor trading staff operating on venues not regulated by the SEC. People who joined from outside finance, or moved into US markets after years trading elsewhere, also only have a small slice of their experience counted.
With those caveats in mind, the average years of financial services experience across these firms was just 6.6 years. More than half of the registered personnel across these firms have less than five years of experience.
Jane Street, which had the most registered personnel of the seven firms, had the least experience on average of any US-native firm. Optiver and IMC staff had less experience on average, but are based in Amsterdam, which may be home to more of its senior staff. Jane Street had a greater proportion of staff with less than five years of experience than any US-based trading firm, and also the lowest proportion of staff with over 15 years of experience.
The most experienced firm was Susquehanna, where staff have 8.7 years of finance experience on average. The firm has the highest proportion of staff with over 15 years of experience. This makes sense, as it's the oldest US-native firm on the list; the firm was where most of Jane Street's founders worked before striking out on their own.
Over a quarter of registered personnel across these firms have just one year of experience in finance or less; at the Dutch firms, over 30% of registered staff are tadpoles. This could reflect the massive hiring sprees seen at these firms in recent years, or it could be a sign that most people leave before rising through the ranks.
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