Electronic trading firms, unlike hedge funds, are usually proprietary trading firms, meaning they trade using their own money rather than on behalf of investors. Money doesn’t grow on trees, however, and even when growing exponentially, you could always be investing more. Hudson River Trading (HRT), which made $4.2bn in net profit for the first quarter of the year, recently hired someone to make sure it has even more cash to spend.
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Jared Miller joined HRT as its head of debt investor relations. HRT did not respond to a request for comment, but it seems to be a newly created role, which will involve working alongside CFO Brad Olson and head of corporate finance Anthony Zielinski. Miller was previously head of debt investor relations at Citadel, where he worked for five years. He also spent 16 years at Goldman Sachs where he was an investor relations MD.
At a time when the boundaries between hedge funds and prop trading firms are blurring, HRT seemingly creating a such a prominent client-facing role only blurs those lines, but taking on debt is nothing new for the firm. It has been doing so for years and, in January, it secured a $2.9bn refinancing of a $2.35bn loan due in 2030.
It may just be the case that Hudson River Trading needs to keep its creditors reassured as it continues to grow. In 2022, Moody’s downgraded its outlook of HRT from Stable to negative after expanding “outside of its core historical areas of focus;” the firm was rated stable by S&P in its most recent refinancing, and presumably wants to keep it that way.
That might be hard as it continues to adopt AI, which has incurred various new costs. Traders, for example, are reportedly spending up to $1,000 per day on tokens and, while it’s not clear what kind of GPU infrastructure the firm has, rival firms like Jane Street and XTX Markets have invested massively in it.
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