CFM: The collaborative French quant fund that doesn't like hiring portfolio managers
Multiple quant hedge funds have been rapidly expanding in France in recent years. The largest is London-based Qube Research, but the culture there can be opaque, with traders oftentimes not seeing their own P&L. Another French quant fund, which has almost doubled in size since 2020, has a much more open culture with a few extra quirks.
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Business Insider reports that Capital Fund Management has grown from 260 employees in 2020 to 450 today. This includes an expansion of its New York office, where headcount rose from 15 to 40. According to the fund's president Philippe Jordan, CFM has a "dynamic" and "sustainable" culture that has resulted in very low turnover. That culture is antithetical to traditional hedge funds, as it gives its quants a lot of opportunity to openly publish much of their research, rather than hoarding it as proprietary secrets. This has made it particularly effective for CFM to hire from academia.
Like Renaissance Technologies in the US, CFM has a distinctly academic and scientific approach to hiring. Business Insider reports that CFM already has ~100 researchers, predominantly PhD physicists, and tries to hire 15 new PhDs every year. The latest PhD quant to arrive, for example, is Léonard Lehoucq, a PhD astrophysicist from Sorbonne who joined in October. While it's thought to educate its hires on finance while in the job, CFM has also hired multiple graduates of the DEA El Karoui, the most notable masters in financial engineering course in Europe.
CFM doesn't just hire from the Grand Ecoles, though; in September, it hired Vadim Munirov, a former Capula quant strat with a PhD from Princeton and a masters from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology. Other PhD quant hires in 2025 have come from Durham University in England, and the University of Bologna in Italy.
For its technology hires, CFM seems to prefer more experienced hires. Last month, Sébastien Brasseur joined as a director and head of its prediction platform; he spent the last four years as a distinguished engineer at SocGen, and was the France CTO for data and AI at Microsoft. Thomas Linck, who joined as head of platform engineering in June, was a VP at French environmental intelligence firm Kayyros.
One of the most curious facets of CFM's hiring strategy is that it doesn't run siloed pods, and appears to hire barely any portfolio managers (PMs). According to LinkedIn, the fund has hired 76 people in the past year, none of whom call themselves PMs. Perhaps it's a French thing; at Qube, only ~10% of staff are thought to be PMs.
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