By Thornton
It’s another bad day for hedge-fund quants.
Greenwich, Conn.-based WorldQuant has reportedly laid off about 130 employees and shuttered five overseas offices at the 750-person, $7.5 billion firm, which had been operating 29 offices around the globe.
Most of the cuts are reportedly being made in branches that are closing, including Bangkok, Mexico City and in Eastern Europe, according to Bloomberg. It’s unclear whether any of the layoffs will hit its Connecticut offices in the posh Old Greenwich neighborhood on Long Island Sound.
The firm didn’t return a request for comment.
WorldQuant was founded by former Millennium trader Igor Tulchinsky in 2007 as a math-based trading platform for Millennium founder Izzy Englander.
The Belarus-born Tulchinsky is a former video-game programmer whose WorldQuant bio boasts that he finished his master’s degree in computer science at the University of Texas in “a record” nine months.
He and onetime wife Valentina were regulars on the Hamptons social scene and active in charities. (A source said that the Tulchinskys divorced in early 2019.) Last year, Tulchinsky received a Lifetime Achievement Award from crooner Michael Bolton’s charity.
The carnage at WorldQuant comes a day after another Greenwich-based quant fund — AQR, run by billionaire trader Cliff Asness — was forced to announce that it was slashing headcount by up to 10 percent.
The back-to-back cuts by two separate quant firms suggests that the strategy — which uses complex math algorithms to predict short-term market movements — may be losing its edge.
Quantitative trading has come to dominate the financial industry over the last decade. But predicting short-term trades has become tougher in a marketplace driven by the president’s tweets, including those aimed at central bank chief Jerome Powell, sources said.
The saturation of quant funds has also made it much more difficult for funds to find an edge. “Everyone does the same thing,” one former quant fund executive told The Post. “There is no secret sauce.”
Some old-school traders even say they are relishing the pain of the robot traders who have come to replace them.
“These guys are engineering themselves into unemployment,” said one non-quant trader. “I can’t say that I’m not enjoying it.”
