Barclays’ Trades With Quant Hedge Fund QRT Surge Past $100 Billion, Reports Bloomberg | LeapRate
Barclays has grown the notional value of its trades with Qube Research & Technologies (QRT) to more than $100 billion, according to a Bloomberg report citing people familiar with the matter, underscoring the quant hedge fund’s growing importance to the bank’s prime brokerage arm.
The figure represents the gross face value of all positions between the two firms, without netting off offsetting trades. London-based QRT, which spun out of Credit Suisse in 2018 with roughly $1 billion in seed capital, has ballooned into one of the world’s most prolific quantitative funds, now managing an estimated $38 billion in assets and employing between 1,400 and 2,000 staff.
QRT is reportedly one of Barclays’ largest prime brokerage clients, helping the British bank climb to fifth place in prime brokerage fee revenue rankings as of June 2024, up from seventh five years earlier. Barclays’ rise comes as competition in the space has intensified since UBS’s absorption of Credit Suisse in 2023 forced many hedge funds to redistribute their prime brokerage relationships.
Prime brokerage has become an increasingly lucrative business line for banks as the hedge fund industry has swelled to roughly $5.6 trillion, dominated by leverage-heavy multistrategy players. Alongside Barclays, QRT maintains prime brokerage relationships with JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and UBS, and reportedly banks with 15 firms for equities and 30 for fixed-income repo, according to regulatory filings.
Notably, QRT disclosed a short position against Barclays shares worth roughly £200 million in March 2024 — a reminder that even close trading partners can bet against each other in public markets.
