London electronic trading firm pays $3m per partner, $450k to everyone else
Quant prop trading firm GSA Capital gave money back to its investors and stopped being a hedge fund back in 2021. But the former Deutsche Bank long-short equity team, founded by John Hiscock, is still giving a lot of money to one important group of people: its staff.
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Accounts for GSA Capital were published earlier this week for the year ending 31 March 2024. The fund operates two principal subsidiaries: GSA Capital Services Limited, a corporation, and GSA Capital Partners LLP, a legal partnership.
Top line figures at the firm were pretty. Revenue was up by 6.6% and profit 2.1%. The firm even found time to increase its headcount by 13%, from 121 to 137 people. Average pay for those people, which included both “investment management” and “administration” staff, was £364k ($450k), an increase on the year prior, in which it paid £344k per person.
Predictably, the biggest bucks went to the members of the legal partnership. There were 22 partners, down from the 26 of 2023 – but the pot they had to split grew ever so slightly. The average payout for a GSA member was £2.4m ($3.0m) last year, a substantial increase on the £2.0 ($2.5m) paid out in 2023. The largest single payout, which likely went to a corporate member of the partnership, was an eye-watering £74m ($92m).
Electronic trading is well-paid. Jane Street topped our global Ideal Employer ranking for perceived compensation, beating hedge funds and private equity firms.
GSA has some famous alumni. A young trader called Alexander Gerko left GSA in 2015 with a small team and backing capital to found XTX markets – which last year paid its partners a somehow more astonishing £14m ($17m) per head.
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