3Red Partners

Igor Oystacher named the firm after three red chairs in the room where he decided to start it. That personal stamp runs through 3Red Partners, a Chicago quant prop shop he founded in 2011 to trade firm capital and nothing else, mostly in commodity, fixed income, and equity futures.

3Red treats trading as a research problem, building its own platform to bridge the firm's engineers and its markets. It recruits from postgraduate engineering programs like Johns Hopkins, Caltech, and the University of Chicago rather than the usual finance pipeline, then runs them across markets from Chicago, New York, Miami, Frankfurt, and an Amsterdam arm. Small next to the Jump and Tower crowd it gets grouped with, it competes on the quality of its software, not its headcount.