Quant Giant Qube — Now Managing $50 Billion — Preps A New Unit Of Human Stockpickers

• London-based quant fund Qube is building out an equity long-short business, according to sources.
• The $50 billion firm has previously backed only externally managed fundamental equity funds.
• The new division will be under Naveen Baid, who joined Qube in 2020 from Morgan Stanley.

Computer-driven hedge fund Qube is hiring flesh-and-blood portfolio managers for a new equity unit, according to two people familiar with the firm's plans.

The quant giant, now managing $50 billion across its suite of strategies, is developing a team of portfolio managers who will trade long and short positions in different sectors and report to investor Naveen Baid, the people told Business Insider.

The manager, which has seen its assets surge more than 300% since the start of 2024, is diversifying beyond its quant roots, much like other well-known systematic managers.

The effort is described as the firm's first internal group of human investors. Last fall, the firm launched a team of sector-focused analysts whose trade ideas are fed into the group's leader, former Balyasny executive Stephen Irvine, as Business Insider previously reported.

The difference between the two initiatives is that the new group will operate similarly to a multimanager fund focused on equities, with each PM able to make their own trades and control their own portfolios, while Irvine's group is more akin to an alpha capture program that uses the analysts' ideas to build a best ideas-type of portfolio.

London-based Qube declined to comment.

The firm has a fair amount of exposure to fundamental equity managers via external investments, as Business Insider previously reported.

Like many managers that have quickly grown their assets, Qube is diversifying its capital across different strategies. There are plenty of examples in the systematic world: Quant pioneer D.E. Shaw now runs billions with human stockpickers and macro investors, and Two Sigma has expanded into asset classes like private markets and real estate.