The LSE Directory / Hedge funds
Two Sigma Investments LP is a quantitative investment management firm that applies data science, machine learning and distributed computing to systematic trading across equities, futures, fixed income, currencies and commodities. Its investment process runs through four stages the firm describes on its own site: sourcing and preparing data, building quantitative models to find persistent market signals, constructing portfolios that optimize for risk and return, and executing trades algorithmically. Beyond the core hedge fund, the firm operates several affiliated businesses, including a broker-dealer, Two Sigma Securities, a real estate investment arm, and Sightway Capital, which invests in energy and infrastructure. Two Sigma differentiates itself from discretionary hedge funds, and from many rival quant shops, through the scale of its in-house technology and data operations rather than a narrow strategy focus. The firm reports drawing on more than 300 petabytes of data from over 10,000 sources and operating computing infrastructure that ranks among the world's top five supercomputer sites, running more than 110,000 market simulations a day. Its roughly 1,700 to 2,000 employees include more than 250 PhDs and over 1,000 data scientists and engineers, a staffing mix aimed at treating markets as a large scale applied research problem. Clients are institutional, such as pension funds, endowments and other allocators investing through its commingled and separately managed quantitative strategies, rather than retail investors. The firm was founded in 2001 by John Overdeck, a Stanford trained mathematician and International Mathematical Olympiad medalist who had worked at Amazon and D.E. Shaw and Co., and David Siegel, a computer science PhD from MIT who had worked at Tudor Investment Corporation and D.E. Shaw. The pair received seed funding from Paul Tudor Jones's Tudor Investment Corporation to launch the firm. Two Sigma Investments LP is registered as an investment adviser with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Assets under management have grown from about $8 billion in 2011 to roughly $70 billion by 2025, with headquarters in New York and offices in Chicago, Houston, Palm Beach Gardens, London, Tokyo, Hong Kong and Shanghai. In September 2025, U.S. prosecutors indicted a former Two Sigma researcher, Jian Wu, on wire fraud, securities fraud and money laundering charges, alleging he secretly altered at least fourteen investment models between 2021 and 2023 to inflate his own compensation, causing an estimated $165 million in client losses. Two Sigma fired Wu in 2024 and reimbursed affected clients. Leadership has been in flux since 2023, when a public rift between co-founders Overdeck and Siegel over strategy and governance led both to step down as co-CEOs in August 2024, handing day to day management to Carter Lyons and Scott Hoffman while the founders remained co-chairmen. That arrangement proved unstable: after Overdeck returned to the firm's management committee, Hoffman resigned as co-CEO in March 2026, citing ongoing governance challenges, and Siegel named Seth Platt to the management committee, with the founders reportedly disputing whether that move makes Platt a co-CEO.
