London's most secretive electronic trading firm is obfuscating its pay
G-Research, the London electronic trading firm expanding to the US, does not seem to want people prying into its accounts.
This is one conclusion that might be drawn from the fact that G-Research likes to give its corporate entities peculiar names.
Several of these entities have been closed down over the past year, including 'Island Research LLP' and 'Trenchant Employee Services Limited' which housed the bulk of the G-Research staff. The key remaining entity is 'Alastair LLP, which provides 'staff and payment agent services.' Alastair LLP has just released accounts for the year to' March 2025.
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Alastair's accounts show that it paid 257 employees an average of £163.5k ($220k each). However, G-Research appears to have a second entity, 'Braunford LLP,' which also provides 'staff and payment agent services,' and has the same designated office as Alastair LLP.
Braunford's accounts came out late last year. For the year ending March 2025 it employed 49 people in the same accounting period, and paid £2.17m per head.
Average pay across the two entities for the year ending March 2025 was £550k for 306 employees. This is less than rival prop trading firms like Jane Street and Hudson River Trading, which paid an average of £808k and £652k across their respective UK entities in 2024.
There are four more bizzarely named entities linked to Alastair and Braunford. 'Cerulan LLC' and 'Watchet LLC' are members of Alastair's LLP, while 'Burlywood LLC' and 'Sarcoline LLC' are members of Braunford's LLP. These are all based in the Cayman Islands, though, and are not subject to disclosing annual results.
G-Research's various and changing entities make year-on-year comparisons impossible. In the 15 months to March 2023, Trenchant Employee Services paid an average of £299k... to over 1,000 employees. Where have the other 700 all gone?
Some have left the firm. Since 2023, the firm has made significant cuts, including ~100 technology staff in London in 2024. It has also been more aggressive in its non-competes, which may have been a response to staff leaving.
Northmark Strategies, a US-based high-performance computing firm, is rumoured to have spun out of G-Research, and may have had its staff counted under Trenchant in previous accounting periods, but this would be a similarly small proportion. The rest are likely in one of the Cayman Islands companies, meaning we're unlikely to get a full picture of its headcount.
The reorganization also means that we no longer have visibility into who is or isn't a partner at G-Research, nor how much they take home as part of the firm's profit sharing scheme. In the 15-month reporting period of 2023, Island Research paid ~19 partners (including corporate entities) an average of £3.9m.
G-Research did not respond to a request for comment.
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