Does Hudson River Trading pay its best people $100m+?
There are banks and then there are electronic trading firms. There are electronic trading firms, and then there is Hudson River Trading (HRT). While Citadel Securities and Jane Street pay very, very well, there are whispers that HRT maybe pays even better. But only if it really likes you.
HRT didn't respond to a request to comment for this article, but last week's Bloomberg article on the firm suggested there might actually be pay downsides to working there. Like Jane Street, Bloomberg said HRT is a caring-sharing sort of place, and that the emphasis is on collaboration and sharing trading strategies. This makes it harder to achieve truly "spectacular" bonuses on an individual basis, said Bloomberg.
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This may be so for most people at HRT. Average pay in London can be a handsome £940k, which is huge but not $100m. Newer joiners may be more likely to receive this high baseline. HRT is expanding fast. It has added at least 200 people so far this year, an increase of 20%. Many new hires are recent graduates. But multiple sources tell us that some senior people at the firm are - or at least were historically - paid Millennium-like money.
"Fresh out of university, you'll get the scraps," says one US headhunter who works with the firm. "It will still be a lot of money by most metrics, but nothing compared to what the top people at HRT are getting."
At the top end, he claims there people at HRT on $100m+. Multiple sources inside and outside the firm in headhunting firms confirmed this. Some told us that when HRT was founded in 2002, some non-founder employees got percentage deals that could be as high as 15% of profits. These deals are thought to have been reined-in and reduced as HRT revenues and profits have risen stratospherically. But sources say HRT will still cut lower percentage deals for the people it really wants to hire.
"They are collaborative, but they are also capitalists," says one headhunter. "If they don't pay their earners, Citadel Securities will." The recipe for earning the biggest money is tried and tested: massive PnL means massive pay.
To the extent that these deals exist, it's not clear who gets them. Insiders stress that HRT has a culture of humility and being credit shy, which would seem at odds with star payouts. Bloomerg quoted HRT co-founder Alex Morcos as saying they had "visceral hatred" of cutthroat company cultures.
However, HRT has also made some big hires and big hires don't come cheaply. Jesse Cohen, a former Goldman Sachs MD and star joined in 2018 and is thought to be running the algo development team. Xianchao Xie, a quant researcher, joined from Two Sigma in 2022 and is thought to be a big deal in the medium frequency space. In late 2025, HRT hired Harsh Padia, the chief executive of HAP Trading, to help build its options business.
Some HRT stars have also left or retired. As we were first to report, partner Oaz Nir quietly stepped down in 2024. Bailes Brown, an algo developer who joined from Jane Street, left in 2023 and has yet to resurface. It's not clear how much they were paid, but presumably they won't be needing to find new jobs immediately.
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