Quiet London quant firm Quadrature paid its staff £4.5m per head in 2025
You can earn a lot of money in an electronic trading firm. Jane Street and Citadel Securities each paid their global headcount an average of over $2m last year. London-based trading firm Quadrature is a different beast entirely.
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Accounts for Quadrature Capital Limited released today show that the firm had a turnover of £2.2bn in the year ending January 31st 2026, just under a billion more than it earned in the previous period.
For that performance, the firm paid its 169 employees an average of £4.55m ($6.1m) in 'wages and salaries'. As pay rose, the team shrunk; accounts for the prior year showed it had 173 employees and paid them an average of £2.78m. This compares to an average of $1.9m at Jane Street, $1.1m at HRT and $793k at Optiver in London in 2025.
What makes Quadrature so special? Insiders have said that staff are abnormally happy to work there, and that few ever leave. It primarily employs 'quant developers' rather than traders or researchers (similar to how Hudson River Trading employs 'algorithm developers'). The firm also has links to the UK's Labour party, and has a sister climate foundation that paid its 39 staff an average of £157k in 2025.
Quadrature is known to have a very impressive compute infrastructure stack; job listings last summer described the firm as having "over 20,000 CPU cores, 2,000 GPUs, 500TB of RAM and 10PB of storage." This would mean the firm has just under 12 GPUs per employee.
That stack may have grown even larger since then. The accounts show the firm added £230m of ‘equipment and software’ in the year to January 2026, nearly doubling the cost of its kit to £463m. The notes also stated that, after that accounting period, the firm "entered into a number of hire purchase arrangements for IT server equipment, with total undiscounted minimum lease payments of £553.5 million payable over three to four years."
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