Quant roles by asset class: equities, options, futures, FX, rates, credit, commodities and crypto
Two offers can carry the same title, "Quantitative Researcher", and describe completely different jobs. One has you fitting volatility surfaces for American options; the other has you building supply and demand balance sheets for natural gas. The asset class decides your data, your models, your holding periods, and often who you will compete with for the rest of your career. Firm websites and job ads say a lot about this, so this guide reads them closely.
Last reviewed 2026-10-04. Every claim below is labeled as official (a firm's own website or job ad), reported (press), or self-reported (anonymous posts on Blind). Job ads change constantly; the ones cited were live on 2026-10-04.
The map in one table
| Asset class | The core modeling problem | Visibly active firms (examples, sourced below) |
|---|---|---|
| Equities and ETFs | Cross-sectional signals, execution, ETF fair value | Jane Street, Susquehanna, Citadel Securities, Millennium |
| Options and volatility | Pricing, volatility surfaces, Greeks, hedging | Optiver, IMC, Akuna, Tower, DRW |
| Futures | Time-series signals across many markets | Man AHL, Winton, DRW |
| FX | Pricing and risk in a mostly OTC, electronic market | XTX Markets, Optiver, Flow Traders |
| Rates | Yield curves, bond and swap pricing | Jump, principal trading firms in Treasuries |
| Credit | Pricing thinly traded bonds, often via RFQ | Flow Traders |
| Commodities and energy | Fundamentals, term structure, options books | Jane Street, IMC, DRW, Citadel, Vitol |
| Crypto | Fragmented venues, protocol and token mechanics | DRW (Cumberland), Jump Crypto, Flow Traders, XTX |
The firms listed are unranked examples with a public, sourced footprint in that asset class. Most large firms trade several of these at once: XTX says it produces price forecasts for over 53,000 instruments "across equities, fixed income, currencies, commodities and crypto", and Jump's homepage simply says "Every asset class. Every time horizon." (Official, 2026.)
Equities and ETFs
Equities are the most data-rich asset class and, for that reason, the most crowded. A self-reported comment on a 2023 Blind thread about choosing between Citadel teams put it bluntly: "equities quant is pretty established". (Self-reported, 2023, one anonymous user.)
Two very different businesses live here. Market makers quote prices continuously; ETF market making is a good example of how concentrated that can be. Bloomberg reported in December 2025 that Jane Street accounts for 21% of ETF market making, with Susquehanna at 14.4% and Citadel Securities at 11.2%, as relayed by eFinancialCareers in September 2026 in a story about Goldman Sachs hiring C++ specialists for a new high-frequency ETF market making team. (Reported, 2025 to 2026.) Jane Street itself says it "became known for its expertise in domestic and international ETFs". (Official.)
The other business is equity long/short and statistical arbitrage at hedge funds, often organized in pods. eFinancialCareers reported in October 2026 that Drew Gillanders, who ran an international equities business encompassing "10-15 different portfolios" at Citadel, will run a new Millennium international equities business in London. (Reported, 2026.) How the Millennium unit will be organized has not been made public. Quant work here leans on cross-sectional prediction: ranking many stocks against each other.
Options and volatility
Options desks are where classical quant finance survives most visibly. The modeling problem is pricing many related contracts consistently, then managing the resulting risk. Job ads spell it out:
- IMC's Sydney equity options volatility trader ad asks for a "deep understanding of options Greeks, volatility surfaces, and market microstructure". (Official job ad, 2026.)
- Tower Research's senior options quantitative researcher ad covers "developing options pricing and risk models", "improving real-time volatility valuation and fitting", and asks for expertise in "detailed implementations of numerical pricing for American options". (Official job ad, live 2026-10-04.)
- Jane Street's exotic options trader ad asks for "strong quantitative skills in pricing complex derivatives" and sits "at the intersection of our single stock and index options businesses". (Official job ad, 2026.)
Several firms define themselves through options. Akuna describes itself as "a leading proprietary trading firm specializing in options market making"; IMC says it was founded in 1989 by two traders on the Amsterdam Equity Options Exchange; Optiver, trading since 1986, lists options first in a universe that runs "from options and ETFs to equities, bonds and currencies". (All official.) The field keeps moving: eFinancialCareers reported in September 2026 that Hudson River Trading hired Harsh Padia "to help build its options business". (Reported, 2026.)
If you want to practice the decision-making these desks screen for, our market making game and the Optiver firm guide are a reasonable start.
Futures and the trend-following tradition
Futures are standardized, exchange-traded and available across equity indices, bonds, currencies and commodities, which makes them the natural home of systematic macro and trend following. Man AHL says it was founded in 1987, has traded momentum strategies "for around three decades", and trades "800+ markets". Winton says it has pioneered trend following since 1997 and trades "thousands of exchange-traded and over-the-counter instruments". (Official.)
The modeling problem is time-series rather than cross-sectional: will this market keep moving, and how do signals behave across regimes? A current DRW futures researcher ad describes "machine learning-based trading signals on intraday and daily data" and "regime-aware models and conditional signal frameworks based on market states (e.g., volatility, correlations, risk conditions)". (Official job ad, 2026.) The Winton firm guide covers how one trend follower recruits.
FX
FX is enormous and mostly over the counter. The BIS 2025 Triennial Survey found average daily FX turnover of $9.5 trillion in April 2025 (the preliminary release said $9.6 trillion), up 27% from April 2022, with spot up 42% and FX options up 108%. Electronic trading accounted for 59% of execution. (Official, BIS, September and December 2025.) The BIS also notes principal trading firms acting as "non-bank liquidity providers" alongside bank dealers. (Official.)
The best-known non-bank name in FX is XTX Markets, which describes "differentiated liquidity directly to clients worldwide", "$250bn daily traded volume" across asset classes, and "over 25,000 GPUs in our research cluster". (Official, 2026.) FX quant work is about pricing a currency pair across many venues and clients at once and managing inventory, with machine learning heavily emphasized at firms like XTX. Optiver and Flow Traders also list currencies among their products. (Official.) The XTX Markets firm guide has the interview side.
Rates and fixed income
Rates quants think in curves. A Jump Trading fixed income researcher ad in London lists "bond and interest rate swap pricing" and "yield curve analysis", targets "medium- to long-frequency alpha" with "holding periods ranging from several hours to several days", and asks for depth in deep learning, Bayesian time series, or high-dimensional statistics. (Official job ad, 2026.)
Principal trading firms are major players in the most liquid slice of this market. A Federal Reserve note found that PTFs accounted for 61% of trading volume in nominal coupon Treasuries on electronic interdealer broker platforms in April to December 2019, but only about 21% across all Treasury cash venues, where primary and other dealers still accounted for a little over half. (Official, Federal Reserve FEDS Note, August 2020. These figures are older; the split may have shifted.) In practice, electronic on-the-run trading looks like an HFT job; the rest still looks like dealer and hedge fund work.
Credit
Credit is the least transparent corner of this map. Corporate bonds are numerous and many trade rarely, which makes pricing a bond that has not traded today the core problem. Flow Traders lists corporate and sovereign bonds among its products and says it trades off-exchange "often through Request-for-Quote platforms". Jane Street says that "today, we are major players in the Equities, Bonds, and Options markets", though it does not break out credit specifically. (Official.) A self-reported Blind post from 2023 by a bank quant developer who had worked on "Mortgage, Fixed Income and credit products" drew a skeptical reply from another commenter who was not identified as a bank quant: "Asset pricing quants don't make huge tc anymore like they did in the 90s". (Self-reported, 2023, anonymous.)
Commodities and energy
Commodities reward domain knowledge more than most. A DRW commodities macro analyst ad asks analysts to "analyze global macroeconomic cycles, central bank policy, interest rates, and inflation" (a "Top-Down Macro" remit) alongside building "supply/demand balance sheets", and DRW's London commodities researcher ad asks for "experience using AI and LLM's". (Official job ads, 2026.) Jane Street's NYC commodities trader ad prefers "gas, power or oil" experience and describes a "commodity delta one and options book with an emphasis on larger, longer tenor trades". IMC is hiring a London commodities volatility trader for "listed commodities options". (Official job ads, 2026.)
The payoffs can be extreme in both directions. Citadel's London natural gas trader Chris Foster and his team reportedly generated $2bn in profits after the outbreak of war in Ukraine in 2022, according to the Financial Times as relayed by eFinancialCareers in September 2026. (Reported.) Meanwhile UK filings for Vitol Broking Limited showed pay per head falling from about £2.7m in 2024 to about £1.55m in 2025, as reported by eFinancialCareers. (Reported from company filings, London.) On the candidate side, the same 2023 Blind commenter quoted in the equities section added that they "haven't really seen quants scratch the surface on commodities". (Self-reported, one anonymous user.)
Crypto
Crypto combines market-making mechanics with a very different venue landscape. DRW says it has been "at the forefront of crypto asset trading since 2014"; its Cumberland arm offers OTC spot liquidity "in dozens of cryptocurrencies", listed options and futures, bilateral crypto options and non-deliverable forwards. (Official.) Jump Crypto describes itself as "builders of blockchain technology" and says it does not accept funds from external investors. A Jump campus crypto researcher ad asks for knowledge of "smart contracts, cryptography, crypto-economics, networking, consensus algorithms". (Official, 2026.) Flow Traders and XTX also list digital assets or crypto among their markets. (Official.)
Is crypto a career risk? A 2024 Blind thread asked exactly that. The most substantive reply, from a user not identified as a quant practitioner, argued that "the methods of quant analysis don't change fundamentally for different kinds of assets aside from some domain specific stuff". (Self-reported, 2024, anonymous.) Treat that as one person's opinion.
What desks advertise (base salary, official ads)
Posted pay ranges are one of the few hard, comparable data points. All are US base salaries from live job ads (official, accessed 2026-10-04), excluding discretionary bonus, which at these firms can be a large share of total pay.
| Role | Firm, location | Posted base |
|---|---|---|
| Commodities Trader (experienced) | Jane Street, New York | $300,000 |
| Exotic Options Trader (3 to 6 yrs) | Jane Street, New York | $300,000 |
| Index Options Volatility Trader | IMC, Chicago | $250,000 |
| Research Engineer (Options) | DRW, Chicago | $175,000 to $225,000 |
| Senior Options Quantitative Researcher | Tower Research, New York | $120,000 to $180,000 |
These are single ads with differing seniority and do not rank asset classes by pay.
Does your first asset class lock you in?
Partly. Statistical skills transfer; market structure knowledge does not, at least not instantly. Firms seem to recognize this: many of the senior ads above ask for years in that specific product, such as "3+ years' experience in Commodities Options markets" at IMC or "5+ years of experience managing an equity options book focused on the Hong Kong market". (Official job ads.)
For a first job, the honest advice is to weigh the team and the learning above the asset class, while knowing what each implies: options and rates reward pricing mathematics, equities and futures reward statistics at scale, commodities rewards fundamentals, and crypto rewards comfort with new market structure. Either way, interviews test the same fundamentals: probability, statistics and careful reasoning.
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