JPMorgan is quietly hiring from one of Goldman Sachs' most profitable systematic desks
Exchange traded funds (ETFs), are more popular than they've ever been. A Goldman Sachs report in March said that, last year, active ETFs held $1.8tn in assets. One of the most lucrative strategies for these investment vehicles is program trading: the process of using algorithms to predict which stocks will be added to an ETF during a period of index rebalancing and capitalizing on price inefficiencies. Goldman's program trading team has had impressive revenues per head in the past, but JPMorgan has poached several employees who built both the strategies and the underlying technology.
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Quazi Haydar, an executive director (ED) and lead platform engineer for program trading, left Goldman Sachs to join JPMorgan as an ED within the bank's technology division. He'll be working on program trading, as well as other related work. Haydar spent 12 years at Goldman Sachs, joining as a graduate. He is thought to have left the bank abruptly after receiving offers from multiple firms, including JPMorgan. Haydar is proficient in sequencer frameworks, a low-latency Java technique that is very rare and can earn developers large pay packages.
At the start of this year, JPMorgan also hired John Jose as a managing director (MD) on the risk desk of program trading. He was most recently at hedge fund Millennium, but previously spent 13 years at Goldman where he was latterly EMEA head of program trading. Bloomberg said in 2022 that the program trading team pulled in over $700m a year at a headcount of 20. Insiders allege that Haydar and Jose were close, but Haydar did not respond to a request to confirm this.
If not to reunite with Jose, Haydar may be joining JPMorgan because he feels he has a better chance of making MD. He became an executive director less than five years into his Goldman career, but stayed at that seniority for five and a half years. Goldman promotes MDs on a biennial basis, and he didn't make the cut this year, meaning he would have had to wait until Winter 2027 for another shot. If he and Jose replicate their results from Goldman's program trading team at JPMorgan, that promotion could come sooner.
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