Quantlab Financial LLC is a proprietary trading firm headquartered in Houston, Texas, founded in 1998 by Wilbur "Ed" Bosarge Jr., a former Rice University mathematics professor, and Bruce Eames, a former Boston Consulting Group associate. The firm trades exclusively with its own capital and does not manage money for outside investors, a point it states explicitly on its own site along with warnings against unauthorized solicitation in its name. It builds automated, algorithmic trading systems in house, employing mathematicians, scientists and software engineers who develop the predictive models and execution technology the firm trades on. Quantlab describes its culture as closer to a research lab or technology company than a conventional trading floor, organized around collaborative, science-driven problem solving rather than individual discretionary traders. Within the high-frequency trading category, Quantlab specializes in equities market making and liquidity provision built on proprietary, latency-sensitive infrastructure, and has extended that same in-house model to futures markets. In March 2017 it acquired the proprietary trading technology and intellectual property of Teza Group, bringing on roughly twenty technologists, quantitative researchers and operations staff and forming Quantlab Futures Technology Inc, a subsidiary based in New York and Chicago dedicated to quantitative strategies in global futures. This differentiates it from firms that outsource technology or license third-party trading platforms; Quantlab's research, infrastructure and execution stack are built internally, and the firm has cited a two decade track record of continuous strategy and latency refinement rather than a single static edge. At its peak through 2015, Quantlab was reported to account for as much as 3 percent of New York Stock Exchange trading volume on some days and to have generated more than 3 billion dollars in cumulative trading profits over its history. The firm has also been active in defending its intellectual property: it sued former employees Andriy Kuharsky and Vitaliy Godlevsky and others over an alleged theft of trading code used to launch a rival firm, SXP Analytics, and won a May 2015 jury verdict of 12.2 million dollars against the two named defendants plus a further 28.5 million dollars in settlements from six other defendants and SXP Analytics LLC; an appellate court upheld the verdict in June 2017. Quantlab has also cooperated with regulators, testifying in a September 2020 U.S. trial against former Deutsche Bank traders accused of spoofing precious metals futures markets. Its current offices, per its own site, are in Houston (headquarters), Austin, New York and Singapore.
