Squarepoint Capital

Squarepoint is what survived two of banking's biggest upheavals. It began in 2000 as nQuant, a proprietary equities team four Ecole Polytechnique graduates built inside Lehman Brothers in Tokyo. When Lehman failed in 2008 the team moved to Barclays; when the Volcker Rule barred banks from prop trading, Barclays had to let it go, and in December 2014 it spun out as an independent firm.

Founders Olivier Durantel, Gregoire Schneider, Antoine Fillet and Maxime Fortin still run it, now as one of the larger systematic managers anywhere, trading diversified quant strategies across equities, fixed income, futures and FX at frequencies from slow to fast. Headquartered in New York, it operates across roughly seventeen cities worldwide on heavily customized technology.