[joshu]

i'm not convinced they're smarter than anyone else. i'd rather invest in renaissance or citadel...

my coworkers at morgan were all physics or cs phds. and a consulting expert got a nobel prize while i was there. amusingly, i interviewed at google around the same time, and some of the engineers were condescending about the quality and education of my coworkers.

[Juliuso]

Renaissance over Citadel. If I'm not mistaken, Renaissance is purely automated trading. No traders or trading floor in the conventional sense. Plus they weathered the fallout of 08 much better than Citadel.

What's sad is that these smart people, including ones I've met while working as a SysAdmin for a Prop Trading firm often don't have access to the capital to start their own shops. This is due to the incestuous nature of the Finance world, where it's a lot more about who you know than what you know.

Sadly, they're often in the employ of third-rate CEOs, who always get a cut off the top, and pay the producers a mere fraction of what they made for the firm and their clients.

[borism]

it's not only purely automatic

The Medallion Fund has its own internal trading desk, staffed by approximately 20 traders, and trades from Monday opening bell in Australia through Friday closing bell in the US.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renaissance_Technologies

[gms]

Why condescending? What is there to be condescending about when it comes to physics/CS PhD's?

[joshu]

it was just an offhand remark. "if you came to google, you'd get to work with mostly phds, instead of who you work with now" -- without even asking about the kind of people i worked with.

[smanek]

granted rentech probably has desco beat (at least in terms of recruiting toughness - the only metric I'm really in a position to judge by). But I don't think anyone would deny that desco is part of that top tier too.

FWIW, in my experience the handful of citadel programmers I've interacted with aren't quite in the same league as shaw/rentech/getco/jane st/etc. I have no idea how that reflects on their returns though ;-)

[willdav]

I agree with you. they don't have smarter people than any of these big names morgan, goldman.

They show off to attract similar candidates because they know they are nowhere compared to these biggies.

If I have a offer from Goldman why the fuck I join de shaw or xyz company.

[borism]

Peter J. Weinberger (W in AWK) worked at RenTec before moving to Google.

I would not invest in anything from them however. Medallion has been closed for new money for many years now and all other offerings performed poorly to say it politely.