You can take a quant out of trading but you can’t take trading away from the quant. The electronic trading industry is a rich source of talent for startups, and some of the traders currently working in fintech startups have been building out quant trading functions within their companies.

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Take Mark Wilkinson, Citadel Securities’ former head of FICC systematic trading, who left for investment platform WealthSimple. He announced via LinkedIn yesterday that he’s “building out a quantitative trading function” at the fintech; job listings state that the quant traders hired will conduct research and build algorithms “to produce an edge for our clients and the company.” Wilkinson is looking for people with at least three years in quant trading for the buildout.

He’s not alone. Annanay Kapila, an ex-Tower Research trader and founder of perpetuals exchange QFEX, told us that his firm has begun “open-sourcing some mid-frequency trading strategies to some of our clients.” He announced last week on LinkedIn that, in the first 12 days of October, QFEX made more money than it did for the 12 months ending August 2026. He said the firm’s trading strategies benefitted greatly from the release of OpenAI’s Astra model in early September: “I’ve never seen any model be able to do quant research as well as Astra.”

More QaaS (Quant as a Service) startups may be birthed if more ex-traders get backed. Alexandr Wang, chief AI officer of Meta, was famously part of Hudson River Trading’s first intern class; he said on a recent podcast that he spoke to HRT’s founder (presumably Jason Carroll) and advised him to “just invest in all the interns… give all the interns seed checks.” 

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