Tiny London quant fund emerges as one of the UK's biggest corporate taxpayers

Quadrature Capital, a London quantitative hedge fund with only 246 employees and no outside investors, made $8.7bn in trading profits and paid more than £1.14bn in UK corporation tax last year. That bill exceeded Barclays’ by three times and HSBC’s by roughly double, illustrating how a small team using mathematical models and machine learning can produce profits comparable to those of the world’s largest funds. Quadrature and London rivals Qube and G-Research benefit from access to graduates in science and technology, as well as nearby AI research. The fund trades through statistical arbitrage, using large datasets to predict price movements over hours or days.

Founded in 2010 by Greg Skinner and Suneil Setiya, Quadrature returned outside investors’ money in 2018, fearing that excessive assets could undermine returns. Its chief executive, Aidan Devane, says the firm aims to expand beyond equities into other electronically traded markets, including futures, options and currencies. The founders say they pay UK tax because they built the business in Britain; although the firm retains Cayman Islands entities, these have been taxed as UK-resident companies since at least 2019. Quadrature’s tax arrangements have drawn attention alongside its £4mn donation to Labour and Setiya’s purchase of a £275mn London property, whose group-purchase structure reportedly reduced stamp duty. The firm also supports anti-poverty and climate work through a foundation that has committed $1.8bn to 332 organisations.