Morning Coffee: Brave and humble quant buys a $350m home. Bank of America traders and their “extraordinary” goings on

Quadrature Capital, the quant trading firm, doesn’t seek publicity – it has an extremely generic website explaining that it “combines cutting edge technology with deep quantitative research” and that its purpose is to “Put People First and Innovate Together”.  There’s a bit more colour on the website of its charitable twin, the Quadrature Climate Foundation, which tells us that when they’re attacking the problem of climate change, the Quadrature values are to be “Collaborative, Humble, Objective, Brave and Driven”. 

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But whatever they do, they seem to do it very well.  The climate foundation, which was only set up in 2019, has already committed grants totalling $1.5bn to various environmental projects.  Which would suggest that it’s made significantly more than that for its owners, as well as paying its employees an average of more than $3.5m each.  One of the founders, Suneil Setiya has just bought Providence House, a London mansion with lake and pool, for £275m (about $350m).   In case you have lost track of exactly how much is a lot in this world of incredibly rich-people numbers, when Ken Griffin of Citadel paid $238m for a penthouse in New York in 2019, it set a record for the most expensive US house purchase ever.  In a small touch of irony, the vendor of Setiya's new house was property developer Nick Candy, who is the treasurer of the UK’s Reform Party, while Quadrature made the largest ever donation to the Labour Party.

This might tell us a bit about the potential future of the very top end of finance.  Once upon a time, the biggest yachts and houses were owned by bankers, like J Pierpont Morgan.  After a while, even the richest sellsiders started to be eclipsed by the hedge fund billionaires, who ended up themselves being left behind (apart from a small number of multi-strategy colossi) by the private equity industry.

But Quadrature Capital isn’t a fund – it’s a proprietary trading firm which invests its own capital. One of the reasons the website is so basic is that if you call them up and ask to make an investment, they’ll say no. And it doesn’t have anything like the headcount of a hedge fund either – there were only 173 employees in London at the end of last year, and while there will be some more in Singapore and New York, the entire staff wouldn’t fill a quarter of a floor in a bulge bracket firm.

Some people predict that this is how the industry is going to develop.  More computer power, smaller organisations, more concentration of wealth and less need for ordinary employees.  They might be right.  Which would mean that it will become even more necessary for bankers to take a leaf out of Quadrature’s values and stay brave and humble.

Elsewhere, commodities traders are something of a breed apart; they trade some of the most volatile markets there are, and if you’ve got a few years of experience in that job, you’ve probably seen a lot of crazy things.  So it takes a lot to make them break out the superlatives.  But according to Denis Manelski and Soofian Zuberi, the co-heads of markets at Bank of America, even by those standards, the oil and gold markets during the first quarter of 2026 were something else. 

As Manelski put it, “the activity levels in those two commodities were extraordinary”.  It’s hard not to detect a certain wistfulness to his added comment, that “it’s been so headline-driven”.  Clients trading in a panic based on news stories that everyone can see are the very best kind of clients, particularly in a market like oil where the norm is big players trading strategically on the basis of private information.  Zuberi added, also possibly with a touch of understatement, that “we were in a good position to help clients execute”.  Overall commodities trading revenue was up 60% for BoA, and Morgan Stanley also seems to have had a very strong quarter driven by the same headlines.  It seems that across the Street, this might have been a quarter where the sell side also did abnormally well.

Meanwhile …

Zohran Mamdani wants to tax Ken Griffin's New York penthouse. (X) 

When he was at Merrill Lynch, Harley Bassman invented the MOVE index, a kind of equivalent of VIX for Treasury bonds.  Inventing a good index is potentially incredibly lucrative, but it seems that Bassman has had trouble getting paid.  He is currently suing Simplify Asset Management, an ETF firm that he invented funds for, in a dispute over exactly what royalties he’s owed. (Bloomberg)

Some people hoped that AI would help to streamline the hiring process, but the most effective applications seem to be ways for candidates to cheat.  From having offscreen advice on technical problems to straight up deepfakes in video interviews, some companies are concluding that they are going to have to go back to in-person chats. (WSJ)

Other financial firms are talking the talk, but Bain Capital has now walked the walk when it comes to expression of confidence in the Gulf region.  It’s going ahead with the opening of its new office in Abu Dhabi. (Financial News)

Mark Mobius, the legendary investor who was the face of emerging markets for years, has died at the age of 89. (FT)

The implicit deal between smart graduates and the big consulting firms was that you would join out of university, work like a dog for a few years, and then even if you didn’t make partner, you’d have the skills, experience and resume to have your choice of top jobs in industry.  Now that AI is changing the role of junior consultants, that deal seems to be coming in to question – summer interns just don’t feel as “integral” as they used to. (Bloomberg)

It turns out that the “con” in the seasonal New York bar crawl “SantaCon” might not have been short for “convention”. The organiser is being prosecuted for wire fraud, after prosecutors allege that a lot of the money collected for charity was diverted to home renovations, luxury holidays and a resort in Costa Rica. (FT)

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