Our Ideal Employer report for 2025 is out. It ranks where you would most like to work in financial services. Over 15,000 people responded. JPMorgan won overall, but not for high pay.
Hedge fund Renaissance Technologies (RenTech) won our category for perceived high compensation. It ranked ahead of Jane Street and Millennium Management, in second and third place respectively. This is the first time that RenTech has topped our compensation category, which was won by Jane Street in both 2023 and 2024.
RenTech is a rather secretive quantitative hedge fund. Founded in 1978, it employs only 300 people according to a recent regulatory filing and manages $91bn in assets under management.
RenTech’s perceived appeal as a lucrative place to work reflects its notoriously successful flagship Medallion Fund, which generated an annual average of 72% in returns before fees between 1994 and 2014. The Medallion Fund has been closed to outside investors for over 30 years; it now only accepts money from current and former employees and their families. Many are thought to be extremely wealthy as a result.
Ranking second, Jane Street is an electronic trading firm, which employed 2,960 people globally and paid them an average of $1.4m each. Jane Street has been noted as a “communist” place to work in terms of compensation – it’s based more on firm performance than personal performance.
In third place was hedge fund Millennium Management. Millennium doesn’t disclose global pay figures, but files regulatory accounts in the UK. It paid its London staff an average of £717k in 2024, while its “members” (legal jargon for partners – usually portfolio managers) earned an average of £4m each. Pay can get even higher if you’re a top portfolio manager at a rival firm; Millennium is known to dangle $50m+ guaranteed pay packages as moving incentives.
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