Hedge fund Squarepoint is still ramping up its commodities trading business
Commodities trading is hot and as we noted yesterday, hedge funds want their place in the flames. That includes Squarepoint, the French quantitative investment firm which might at first glance seem less likely to be involved in trading physical commodities products than the rest.
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Squarepoint didn't respond to a request to comment for this article, but we understand that the fund is a bigger player in the commodities space than might be expected. And it's hiring, including from commodities trading houses.
Recent recruits include Ben Thompson, a base metals trader and former desk head for Trafigura in Singapore, who joined this month. In May, Squarepoint hired Xavier Fixaris, a senior oil trader from Gunvor and TotalEnergies, and curiously appointed him as a quant researcher. It also hired Romain Guion, a former commodities analyst at Citadel, along with Alexandre Gerst from energy trading firm Axpo in Singapore.
Squarepoint spun out of Barclays in 2014 and is mostly known for being very secretive and very French (all but Thompson above are French). However, it's also no newcomer to the commodities space and although it was historically focused on quantitative trading of commodities derivatives, it's pushing more heavily into physicals.
Thompson is an example of this, but he's not the only one. Bloomberg reported last September that Squarepoint was hiring in physical metals under its STG (Squarepoint Trading Group) business run at the time in Dubai by ex-Goldman trader Asad Samar. Squarepoint's metals business itself was run by Ryan McCartney (ex-Trafigura and ex-Morgan Stanley), said Bloomberg. Traders were also being hired from metals trading house MRI Trading AG. The intention was to push into the complex analogue world of shipping and trading metals.
Thompson seems likely to be part of this build. McCartney seems likely to have hired him.
Luke Brace, head of metals at search firm Redstone Search, says the metals market as a whole is hot. “There has been a lot of hiring in the metals space recently as macroeconomic factors and the oil market drive electrification and demand for copper – we have been especially active with traders and operators across the USA,” Brace tells us.
Not all Squarepoint traders stick around though. Samar himself went to Verition in February after less than three years. Millennium recently poached Amit Sinha, who claims to have built Squarepoint's agricultural trading business, and to have made both discretionary and systematic trades. Market sources say Squarepoint was recently beaten to another hire by Gunvor.
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