PDT Partners

PDT Partners traces to a 1993 pitch: mathematician Peter Muller convinced Morgan Stanley to let him trade off models rather than instinct, and his Process Driven Trading group became one of Wall Street's earliest quant stat-arb desks. When the Volcker Rule pushed banks out of proprietary trading, Muller spun PDT out, announced in 2011 and completed in 2013. Blackstone put in 500 million dollars in 2012 without taking any equity, a notably one-sided endorsement.

The firm runs like a research lab staffed with physicists and computer scientists, deploying tested models to automated systems that trade global equity markets while humans watch only risk. Muller himself writes crossword puzzles and performs music, and PDT keeps an unusually tight lid on its strategies and its numbers.