Hudson River Trading

Hudson River Trading is a quantitative trading firm headquartered in New York City and founded in 2002. In 2014, it accounted for about 5% of all trading in the United States. Hudson River Trading employs over 800 people in offices around the world, including New York, Chicago, Austin, Boulder, London, Singapore, Shanghai, Mumbai and Dublin. The firm focuses on research and development of automated trading algorithms using mathematical techniques, and trades on over 100 markets worldwide.

The company is a member of the Principal Traders Group, an advisory group formed by the Futures Industry Association (FIA).

History
On January 16, 2018, Hudson River Trading acquired its rival firm Sun Trading, a global market maker that traded on over 115 exchanges.

In the first quarter of 2021, Bloomberg reported that Hudson River Trading reaped about $1.2 billion from trading, amid heightened market volatility.

Trading
Hudson River Trading is a multi-asset class firm that trades across various time horizons. It differs from stereotypical high-frequency trading firms in several important ways: it holds about 25% of its trading capital overnight (unlike most high-frequency trading firms that hold almost nothing overnight), its average holding time is about five minutes as opposed to the sub-second times observed for some high-frequency trading firms, and it does less than 1% of its trading in dark pools, the lightly regulated private trading venues under scrutiny from regulators.

People
The firm hires programmers, software engineers, and mathematicians to develop and improve its trading strategies. Its head of business development, Adam Nunes, has been cited in a Wall Street Journal article on financial firms' efforts to recruit programming talent away from Silicon Valley and his reasons for optimism about their ability to do so.

Scrutiny
In January 2014, Hudson River Trading and three other quantitative trading firms formed the Modern Markets Initiative, a trade lobbying group. In August 2014, Bart Chilton was added as an advisor to the group.

In March 2014, New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman announced a probe into high-frequency traders, including Hudson River Trading, getting early access to raw stock market feeds at an annual price of $180,000. Hudson River Trading's head of business development, Adam Nunes, defended the company's business practices in statements made to Newsweek, noting that Wall Street traders also had access to the feeds at the same price and many of them already made use of them.

In July 2014, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in the United States launched a probe into ten top high-frequency trading firms, including Hudson River Trading.

Media coverage
Hudson River Trading has been covered in the Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, and Newsweek.