WorldQuant has a few mantras.
The new-age website of the $9 billion quant manager run by Igor Tulchinsky features several, such as “information is opportunity” and “quantity is quality,” though these sayings can mostly be applied to any systematic trading shop.
Where the Connecticut-based manager sets itself a part from peers and rivals is with its talent strategy. “Talent is global, opportunity is not,” the website states.
While plenty of firms proclaim they search worldwide for the top minds, it’s hard to argue that anyone has more of a global team than WorldQuant. It boasts 26 offices around the world and thousands of far-flung, part-time consultants crunching numbers.
Tuesday will be the start of the firm’s International Quant Championship. In this three-stage competition, students and academics from around the world can submit math models predicting market moves for a chance to win a piece of the $400,000 prize pool. The top tier will get an opportunity to compete in front of Tulchinsky and other WorldQuant execs later this year, potentially in Singapore, according to a source close to the firm.
More than 30,000 people from over 100 countries participated in last year’s iteration, which saw a pair of students — Nihar Patel and Vaibhav Gupta — from the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi prevail in the finals held at the company retreat in the Bahamas. This will be the fourth time the competition has been held.
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The competition is an example of how buy-side firms are pushing to connect with undergrads and graduate students more directly, as well as the lengths top funds will go to for a leg up in the battle for talent.
Top finishers in the competition put themselves at the front of the line for future roles at WorldQuant — Patel and Gupta are being considered for internships as they are still in school, said the source close to the firm. It’s one path to getting noticed by the firm if you live outside the typical recruiting grounds — like Ivy League grad programs — for quant finance,
The firm’s BRAIN platform, which hosts the competition online, also contributes to a separate talent pipeline. The network has more than 60,000 participants tinkering with data and submitting models for potential compensation. Out of those 60,000, 4,000 have received part-time contracts from WorldQuant and have been given access to even more data and tools. The top performers out of that pool are given the chance to interview for full-time positions at WorldQuant, and the release on the competition notes that dozens have been hired since the platform’s launch in 2022.
For Tulchinsky, born in Soviet-era Belarus, the competition and the BRAIN platform are a chance to see the best work from untraditional places.
“Our goal is to enable them to produce the best ideas, no matter where they are. We are always striving to develop platforms to reach new pools of talent and equip them to reach their potential,” he said in an email.