One Quant Fund Wants To Hire “Sentiment Traders” From WallStreetBets

As goes every fad where hot money pops up on Wall Street, it should come as no surprise that hedge funds and quant funds are now trying to chase down and bottle up some of the GameStop “mojo” from earlier this month that made many retail traders boatloads of money while sending shockwaves through brokerages.

Cindicator Capital, an offshoot of alternative data provider Cindicator, is looking to hire people from WallStreetBets as sentiment traders, according to Bloomberg. A LinkedIn posting by the company sought out applicants for the position. 

“Launched in 2019, Cindicator Capital is the first quantitative fund powered by Hybrid Intelligence. The fund’s set of uncorrelated strategies adapts to different regimes in the digital asset market, aiming to generate returns in bullish, bearish, and sideways trends,” the posting reads. “Last year, we’ve built Macro Sentiment Indicators, a tool that tracks the moods of market participants to predict weekly movements of the S&P 500 and other instruments with 70% accuracy. Now we’re looking for someone to strengthen our trading team and help us build new products.”

“As a Sentiment Trader, you’ll be the voice of the millions of traders. With a combination of our qualitative approach to measuring market moods and your ‘street-smarts’, you’ll actively manage our internal multi-million corporate treasury. Then you’ll turn the resulting insights into new features, products, and trading strategies for clients,” the company wrote. 

The fund’s requirements are relatively tame, asking for applicants to have “3+ years of active trading experience with both impressive gains and losses, in-depth knowledge of options greeks and indicators, a solid grasp of probability even if you don’t know the theory (i.e. be good at poker)” and to be “an active member of r/wallstreetbets with an account age of >365 days and karma of over 1000”.

The fund specifically is asking for someone without a traditional finance background. “Important: NO higher education in economics or finance. Alternatively, prove that you’re free from any mainstream financial brainwash,” the listing says.

Sentiment traders will be expected to combine Cindicator’s proprietary Macro Sentiment Indicators with their own research to formulate trading ideas for quant strategies, the listing says. Whoever gets the job will be “spending most of [their] time on Reddit, Discord chats, and Twitter to feel the pulse of the tens of millions of retail traders.”

The job offers an impressive $200,000 base salary and a 30% of P/L bonus, on top of traditional benefits.