The LSE Directory / Hedge funds
Squarepoint Capital is a systematic, quantitative investment manager that runs a diversified portfolio of statistical-arbitrage, machine-learning and other data-driven trading strategies across equities, futures, options and foreign exchange. Trading is fully automated: the firm describes executing millions of trades a day through an in-house research and execution technology stack, rather than running discretionary, fundamentals-driven portfolios. The firm sits in the quant multi-strategy segment, and differentiates itself through a research-first, backtest-driven process built on years of tick-level market data and through a private, partner-owned structure rather than outside institutional ownership. Its client base is overwhelmingly institutional and non-U.S.: according to a 2020 regulatory filing cited by Wikipedia, roughly 80 percent of its investors were based outside the United States. Since 2022 the firm has also operated STG (Squarepoint Trading Group), a proprietary trading division that is staffed separately from the hedge fund and trades the firm's own capital rather than client money. The firm traces its roots to nQuant, a proprietary trading desk founded inside Lehman Brothers in 2000 by Olivier Durantel and Gregoire Schneider, later joined by Antoine Fillet and Maxime Fortin; all four founders are alumni of Ecole polytechnique. Barclays inherited nQuant when it bought Lehman's North American operations in 2008, and the Volcker Rule together with a 2014 Barclays restructuring pushed the unit to spin out as an independent firm, renamed Squarepoint Capital, in December 2014; it received UK Financial Conduct Authority approval to manage third-party money on 2 January 2015. Squarepoint is headquartered in New York with a co-headquarters in London, and lists around 17 offices worldwide, including Boston, Dubai, Geneva, Hong Kong, Montreal, Paris, Singapore and Zug. Its regulatory assets under management, as reported to the SEC, stood at about 182 billion dollars in November 2025, rising to roughly 227 billion dollars in an April 2026 Form ADV filing; as with other high-turnover systematic managers, this regulatory figure reflects gross notional exposure and is not the same as net investor capital. In 2025 and 2026 Squarepoint pushed further into market making and broker-dealer activity through STG. On 30 September 2025 STG acquired broker-dealer Hull Partners LLC and relaunched it as STG Securities, led by Kirill Gelman, previously of Barclays' and GTS's automated options trading businesses; by March 2026 the unit was operating as an independent electronic market maker in US options, run separately from Squarepoint's existing hedge fund business.
