Quadrature Capital, the quant trading firm, doesn’t seek publicity – it has an extremely generic website explaining that it “combines cutting edge technology with deep quantitative research” and that its purpose is to “Put People First and Innovate Together”. There’s a bit more colour on the website of its charitable twin, the Quadrature Climate Foundation, which tells us that when they’re attacking the problem of climate change, the Quadrature values are to be “Collaborative, Humble, Objective, Brave and Driven”.
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But whatever they do, they seem to do it very well. The climate foundation, which was only set up in 2019, has already committed grants totalling $1.5bn to various environmental projects. Which would suggest that it’s made significantly more than that for its owners, as well as paying its employees an average of more than $3.5m each. One of the founders, Suneil Setiya has just bought Providence House, a London mansion with lake and pool, for £275m (about $350m). In case you have lost track of exactly how much is a lot in this world of incredibly rich-people numbers, when Ken Griffin of Citadel paid $238m for a penthouse in New York in 2019, it set a record for the most expensive US house purchase ever. In a small touch of irony, the vendor of Setiya’s new house was property developer Nick Candy, who is the treasurer of the UK’s Reform Party, while Quadrature made the largest ever donation to the Labour Party.
This might tell us a bit about the potential future of the very top end of finance. Once upon a time, the biggest yachts and houses were owned by bankers, like J Pierpont Morgan. After a while, even the richest sellsiders started to be eclipsed by the hedge fund billionaires, who ended up themselves being left behind (apart from a small number of multi-strategy colossi) by the private equity industry.