Interns in electronic trading are earning over $90k for a few months work
Electronic trading is home to some of the most lucrative internships in finance, but how much can you really earn? Thanks to New York labour laws, firms are required to provide a salary for their internships, revealing that students are earning thousands of pounds every week to work as quant traders, researchers and engineers.
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We've broken down pay based on open listings across various top firms. While most only provide salary, the exceptions are Optiver and Hudson River Trading, which also include sign-on bonuses in their compensation disclosure. Optiver said that, for PhD quant research interns, it's paying a total compensation of $80k to $90k over the whole internship; if the internship lasts eight weeks like some of Optiver's other opportunities, that would mean quant research interns earn up to $11.25k per week in total compensation.
The rest of the trading firms (which also pay signing bonuses), only provide salary ranges. The highest salary is on offer at the New York office of London-based trading firm XTX Markets. Its AI research internship pays $35k per month in base salary ($8.75k per week) and lasts 12-14 weeks. This means XTX interns can earn $122.5k in salary alone for the full period.
Jane Street, which paid $1.4m on average to its staff in 2024, pays most of its interns the equivalent of a yearly salary of $300k. Quant traders, quant researchers, machine learning engineers, FPGA engineers, network engineers and windows engineers all earn that base.
If you can convert your internship, you'll earn much more. IMC Trading, which paid interns up to $5.8k per week, is thought to have offered total compensation packages of $425k for last year's cohort to return as graduates.
Additionally, Citadel Securities' interns are offered the choice between a $15k housing stipend or premium corporate housing.
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