It's hot. So are people who can help hedge funds predict the weather
In case you haven't noticed, it's been a hot summer. Records are being broken, crops are being destroyed by drought and if you're a hedge fund trying to see into the future, it's never been more important to employ someone who can tell you what this year's 'super el Niño' might do next.
Step forward the quants and meteorologists who can forecast the weather and the traders who can monetise their predictions. They've been popular with hedge funds since at least 2018, when Citadel hired a team of 20 people from weather focused hedge fund Cumulus and started a trend. Since then, Citadel has gone deeper into the weather business and other funds have followed.
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In the past few months, there have been multiple hires in the space, both at Citadel and elsewhere. In July, Citadel recruited Russell Martin, a gas and power trading managing director (MD) from Goldman Sachs to trade weather derivatives in its Houston office. Point72 hired Alex Alifimoff as head of AI Weather in its commodities team in Stamford. Alifimoff will presumably be using AI to predict the weather rather than predicting the weather over data centres; he joined from Citadel where his LinkedIn account says he built AI weather models to support the commodity trading desk.
Rival funds have also been strengthening their weather teams. Balyasny Asset Management has had a weather team since at least 2021, when it hired Alexander Goldstein from Credit Suisse. Goldstein moved to Millennium in 2024 and now leads the weather analytics team there. BAM promoted London-based weather research Sean Moshe Nassimih to become its lead in weather research in June 2026.
Smaller hedge funds have been hiring too. Nanook Energy Advisors, which trades the European energy markets, hired Emmanuele Silvio Gentile from the National Centre for Atmospheric Science in Reading, UK, in June.
Thomas Carson, a director at headhunting firm Redstone Search, said weather is likely to remain a hot topic for hiring. "The recent run of weather focused hires across major funds suggests the emergence of a new competitive frontier: proprietary weather intelligence as an alpha source, where outfits are treating weather as a cross asset alpha source rather than a niche commodity input," he informed us.
Not all meteorologists stay at hedge funds though. Nicholas Klingaman, Citadel's former head of weather, left in July 2025 and now describes himself as a "once and future weather guy." He was at Citadel for around four and half years. Maybe that's all that's needed to retire.
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