Hedge fund Citadel hired a quant researcher from TGS and gave him a large job

As we reported earlier this year, electronic trading firm TGS Management LLC is like Wonka’s Chocolate Factory to the extent that once people join they rarely come out. Lately, however, one of TGS’s long serving quant researchers has emerged blinking into the light and has joined Citadel.

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Citadel declined to comment for this article, but writing on LinkedIn, Alexey Poyarkov, a Russian quant researcher who spent over a decade at TGS, said he is now Citadel’s head of GQS SCI, a unit in its global quantitative strategies group.

It’s not clear when Poyarkov left TGS. It’s thought he may have left last year and that he has been on a non-compete. Coincidentally, or not, his arrival follows the decision of Brian Murphy, a senior trader in Citadel’s GQS group, to take time out to be with his children. 

Poyarkov appears to be a big deal. Before his decade at TGS, he spent time at Google, Microsoft and Yandex. He is a mathematics graduate of Lomonosov Moscow State University, as is the friendly figure of Alex Gerko at XTX. The Wall Street Journal reported in 2017 that TGS hired Poyarkov as an algorithm designer despite his lack of previous financial services experience and paid him $700k in his first year. 

People at TGS rarely say they work for TGS on LinkedIn. When we looked at Poyarkov’s profile in May, there was no mention of his previous employer. Now there is.

Although people leave TGS infrequently, exits are not unheard of. Joseph Choi reportedly left around 2023 to form hedge fund JCAP, which appeared to close in 2024. Another trader, Harvard PhD Bo Liu, is thought to have left TGS for Millennium in 2021 before leaving again three years later.

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