Hartree Partners
I am currently a Quant Researcher and looking to transit to a role which allow me to pick up more discretionary trading. Lucky for me, I was offered a role at Hartee Partners. I am keen to find out more on the questions below.
Does anyone here know the actual size in terms of AUM for Hartree Partners? How are their performance over the last couple of years?
The tricky thing abt quant in discretionary firm can be that they stay as quant forever. In the case of Hartree, is it true that they would groom analyst and provide them a route to PM?
Gd Qn! Bump!
Have you just started the interview process? To begin Hartree is not a hedge fund and does not deal in AUM.
I just completed the final round with one of the partners last night. They seems pretty sincere to bring me on and expecting an offer to be make some time in Jan when everyone is back from holiday. I find some questions such as performance to be sensitive to ask during interview and was hoping someone can shed some light here.
Are you familiar with them? Do you think it’s a good place to be PM? In terms of risk allocated to PM, how huge can the VAR gets?
Odd the recruiter you working with did not explain fully this stuff.
To start, Hartree Partners is a commodity merchant trading firm with 3 main sr partners. The 2 main founders are former traders and the third is the COO and joined the firm later on. The firm is backed by Oaktree Capital for their main financing needs and not sure how much of the firm currently is owned by Oaktree but the bulk of the firm is owned by the partners. There is also various jr partners who run different areas of the firm.
Hartree has performed very well in the last 5 years and especially in the last 3 years similar to other merchant funds due to their unique positioning in the marketplace. The bulk of their success comes from owning unique assets and trading around and as well as being able to acquire books of business of customers to serve.
Yes, they are a good firm to work with as long as one gets along "fit wise" and "personalities match" they pay a bulk of P&L up front in cash and hold minimum retentions so close to how some HFs would pay out. They also like to to cover your seat cost sort upfront so traders know the P&L they make is what they will get bonus'd on, this is why the firm has very little turnover at the PM level. Some of trading books over there get quite big and run a lot of VAR that said they expect majority of those books to develop into a full business that is ongoing aka they are not so much for "cowboy style trading" and more about making your P&L annually and growing a business.
Performance questions are not sensitive these firms are usually upfront about what they can offer and who fits them as mentioned they are usually very low turnover.
Your question about Quant to Analyst to Trader...really depends what book/business you joining and who runs it. I can tell you there is people there who value quants and others who think they are overrated and will just get you to make dashboards all day and stfu.
Any details on Freepoint commodities?
As in? What kind of role/book looking at.
High level, freepoint is a great place to work at with a laid back culture and very flexible WLB. That said they are stingy on var and few people are given the trust to go outside their area of the market.
are you a commodities specialist?
Unfortunately, headhunter have superficial information about them and asked me to Google abt them instead.
Thanks for sharing insights! Great to hear that the firm is doing well. Definitely, sounds like a good place to have a career for the long term (at least that is the impression I got from the partner and various PMs as well). I always struggle asking abt performance and numbers as they always appear to be very sensitive information. 😅
Totally agree! The biggest nightmare and risk for a quant to be sitting in a discretionary team is to build dashboard all days. I have a couple of close friends who made the transition from top tier quant funds and ended up doing nothing more than data collection and dashboarding.
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