Giuseppe Paleologo is known for three things: being a quant at various top hedge funds and trading firms, being on gardening leave, and being a great wit.
Get Morning Coffee ☕ in your inbox. Sign up here.
In his two decade+ career, Paleologo has worked for Citadel (twice), for Millennium and for electronic trading firm Hudson River. In the past five years, he’s had nearly two years of gardening leave and is currently tending his crop again. Paleologo left his job as head of risk management at Hudson River in November 2023, which means he’s now sitting out the market. When this latest period of enforced rest is over, he’ll join hedge fund Balyasny as head of quant research.
While he’s in the shurbbery, again, though, Paleologo is not allowing his quant muscles to atrophy. Despite describing himself as a “constant gardener” and using past gardening leaves to “tend to books, which were once trees,” Paleologo is using his new gardening leave to plant seeds of quantitative finance in students at New York University, where he has just become adjunct professor of mathematics.
Describing his career as unexciting and himself as not even all that funny, Paleologo declined to comment for this article. However, it’s worth noting that quant employment contracts which stipulate fallow periods between roles don’t forbid work in educational establishments. Nor do they prevent quants from going into the technology industry for a spell, but now that tech firms aren’t hiring, education may be the better bet.