The world's most profitable fund has welcomed a Chinese partner from the post-1995 generation.

The group of people best at making money across the globe are passing their chips to young talents.

Recently, a list disclosed by Companies House, the UK's company registration authority, has drawn widespread attention. Titled *13 Top London Hedge Fund Partners Under 35*, the list shows that a group of young traders from leading hedge funds including BlueCrest, Citadel, Millennium and Rokos are stepping into the core of the industry's power circle at an unprecedented speed.

Most people on the list were born in the 1990s, and the youngest one is only 26 years old. Some of them graduated from university just a few years ago, but have already started managing billions of dollars in capital, taking huge risks in global interest rate, exchange rate and macro markets.

The person who sparked widespread domestic attention is Tian Zhou, newly promoted partner at Citadel. This 1996-born Chinese trader first studied Electrical Engineering and Mathematics at Guangxi University and then Central Michigan University in the US for his bachelor's degree, before pursuing a master's degree in Finance at University College London (UCL). After graduation, he joined Citadel as a campus recruit. In November 2021, he served as a Portfolio Analyst, and only after six years, he was promoted to Partner and Associate Portfolio Manager in January 2026.

In the traditional Wall Street system, such a promotion speed is almost unthinkable. According to the standard path of investment banks, a graduate usually needs to go through multiple levels including analyst, associate, vice president and director, spending more than a decade to get access to the core power circle. But inside top hedge funds such as Citadel and Millennium, what determines the promotion speed is not age or seniority, but the ability to generate consistent profits. An excellent trader can bring hundreds of millions of dollars in profits every year, while a wrong talent decision may also lead to the entire team being eliminated by the market.

Thus, a silent power transfer has taken place ahead of schedule.

Campus Recruit Promoted to Partner in 6 Years

If you only look at his resume, Tian Zhou is not the so-called "child prodigy" in the traditional sense.

During his undergraduate years, he first majored in Electrical Engineering at Guangxi University, with a minor in English Interpretation, and won the first-class scholarship for three consecutive years. Later, he entered Central Michigan University in the US to pursue a dual bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering and Mathematics, graduated with a full GPA of 4.0 and the top ranking in his major, and obtained the Summa Cum Laude honor, which is the highest academic honor usually awarded to only the top 1% to 5% of graduates (or a very small number of students with extremely high GPA, such as above 3.9).

Public information shows that Guangxi University once launched a Sino-foreign cooperative education program for the undergraduate major of Electrical Engineering and Automation with CMU, adopting a "3+1" training mode with a schooling length of 4 years, and the two institutions mutually recognize each other's credits as valid. After graduating from undergraduate, Tian Zhou entered University College London to pursue a master's degree in Finance, and graduated with the top Distinction (first-class honor) again. His master's thesis is titled *A New General Numerical Method for Exotic Option Pricing — Binary Tree Monte Carlo Method*, with the research focus on the pricing of complex financial derivatives.

In 2019, Tian Zhou, who graduated from UCL, joined Citadel as a campus recruit. Six years later, he stepped into the core power layer of this world-leading hedge fund.

In the Wall Street context, this is almost a "rocket-speed" promotion path. It is worth noting that Citadel itself is one of the most competitive institutions in the financial industry. Founded in 1990, this hedge fund has assets under management of more than 70 billion US dollars, making it one of the largest multi-strategy hedge funds in the world. Data shows that its 2026 summer internship program received more than 115,000 applications in total, with a final admission rate of only 0.36%, which is even lower than the 3% to 4% undergraduate admission rate of Harvard University, and is called "the hardest ticket to get in the financial circle" by many industry insiders.

Official website data shows that as of April 2026, more than 40% of the company's employees hold a master's degree or above, of whom about 270 hold a doctorate degree, covering nearly 60 disciplines, and the employees come from more than 100 countries and regions around the world.

However, in recent years, with the expansion of Citadel, a number of Chinese faces have begun to appear at the top of this pyramid. For example, Peng Zhao, CEO of Citadel Securities, a math genius born in China and graduated from Peking University, took charge of the world's largest market maker at the age of 34.

Offering a 100 Million USD Compensation Package to Recruit Talents

A hedge fund is essentially an alternative investment institution for institutional and high-net-worth clients. Different from traditional public funds that rely on the "buy and hold for long" strategy, hedge funds can long and short stocks at the same time, trade almost all assets including bonds, interest rates, exchange rates, commodities and derivatives, and amplify returns through leverage.

The world's largest hedge funds are like huge financial empires. Take the "Multi-Manager Platform" represented by Citadel, Millennium, Point72, Balyasny and BlueCrest as an example. These institutions usually consist of dozens or even hundreds of semi-independent teams, each of which is like a small hedge fund with its own researchers, traders and investment managers, independently managing hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars in capital. The title of partner is not just a title on a business card, but means the right of capital allocation, team formation and profit distribution, which can be understood as running a "small hedge fund" of your own inside the financial machine.

To compete for excellent portfolio manager talents, the prices these institutions are willing to pay keep refreshing market expectations. In April 2025, Millennium Management recruited senior stock portfolio manager Steve Schurr from Balyasny, offering a compensation package as high as 100 million US dollars, setting a new industry record.

So why are hedge funds competing for talents so frantically? The answer is very simple: there is more and more capital, but fewer and fewer people who can make consistent profits.

In the past few years, a large amount of institutional capital, pension funds and sovereign wealth funds have continued to flow into the hedge fund industry, and their performance has continuously hit new records. Statistics from Goldman Sachs show that in 2024, the position size of hedge funds in tech stocks, especially the "Big Seven US Tech Stocks", hit an all-time high, and the average price increase of these stocks exceeded 35% that year. Against the backdrop of slowing growth in the traditional asset management industry, hedge funds still maintain strong profitability, which further attracts a large amount of capital inflow.

The expansion of capital has brought new problems: there are not enough investment talents in the market who can manage such capital, and star portfolio managers have a decisive impact on the performance of the fund, while the number of this group is extremely limited, leading to a serious imbalance between supply and demand.

Therefore, the income of top portfolio managers is hardly determined by fixed salary, and is usually directly linked to profits. The compensation system presents an obvious "winner takes all" feature. In the traditional investment banking system, it often takes more than a decade for an analyst to grow into a Managing Director (MD), but in a multi-manager hedge fund platform like Citadel, the evaluation system has only one core criterion — the ability to generate consistent profits. At institutions such as Citadel and Millennium, an ordinary portfolio manager usually earns millions of dollars a year, while some star traders can earn tens of millions of dollars a year.

Behind the high returns is an extremely cruel elimination mechanism. For analysts, traders, investment managers and partners, every promotion is tested by positions of hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars. Inside the multi-manager platform, investment managers are assessed in real time every day, and indicators including rate of return, risk exposure, drawdown range and Sharpe ratio are continuously tracked. Once the performance fails to meet the standards for consecutive periods, the team may be closed within weeks or even months; but if they can make stable profits, they can quickly get several times of capital support and profit sharing.

In a sense, this is more like a non-stop professional competition.

"Interns Make Big Money on Wall Street"

Different from the long promotion system in the traditional financial industry, the hedge fund world follows another set of rules: no seniority requirement, no age limit, only the ability to generate consistent profits counts. Under this promotion logic, more and more young people in their twenties have begun to become the new protagonists of this wealth game.

In the list of "Top Hedge Fund Partners Under 35 in London", the youngest one is Ben Turner from BlueCrest. The 26-year-old grew from an interest rate trader at Barclays to a partner at BlueCrest in only four years, almost completing the career path that would take more than a decade in the traditional financial industry.

As a partner of BlueCrest, Ben Turner will have the opportunity to share the profits of BlueCrest. Reports show that as of March 2025, the 46 London partners of BlueCrest received an average profit of 959,000 pounds (1.3 million US dollars) per person.

BlueCrest is a hedge fund founded by British billionaire Michael Platt. The second youngest partner of this firm is James Liu, 33 years old, graduated from the University of Cambridge, who previously worked at Goldman Sachs for six years and JPMorgan Chase for four years.

In fact, the ability of contemporary young people to make money in the trading field is increasingly not to be underestimated. In the past two years, topics such as "interns making big money on Wall Street" have swept the headlines of major overseas media. Point72, a hedge fund known as "the biggest money-making machine on Wall Street", once offered interns an annual salary of 240,000 to 300,000 US dollars, equivalent to about 1.7 million to 2.2 million RMB.

Outside Wall Street, a similar story is also taking place in Silicon Valley. The recently hyped "post-2000s AI stock god" Leopold Aschenbrenner was originally a researcher at OpenAI. With a 165-page AI trend report, he quickly became famous in Silicon Valley and the investment circle. After leaving OpenAI, he founded the hedge fund Situational Awareness, betting on AI infrastructure fields including chips, storage, power, cloud computing and data centers. In just two years, the assets under management of this fund has expanded rapidly from hundreds of millions of dollars to more than 20 billion US dollars.

Putting the resumes of these young people together, you will find that their growth paths are surprisingly similar.

Most of them are not traditional finance majors, but come from STEM fields such as mathematics, physics, engineering and computer science. The starting point of their career is no longer investment bank analysts, but directly joining hedge funds, quantitative institutions or interest rate trading departments. Jane Street, which we reported on before, is almost the most typical sample of the youth trend on Wall Street. A large number of traders recruited by this firm every year are usually only 22 to 26 years old. The average income per employee is about 2.68 million US dollars (about 18.25 million RMB).

However, the compensation figure is not the most important factor that these young star traders consider. After the one or two-year guaranteed compensation period ends, what really determines the height of their career is still the growth rate of personal ability, as well as the resource support provided by the platform.

This article is from the WeChat Official Account "Dong 40th Street Capital" (ID: DsstCapital), author: Wei Xianghui, published with authorization from 36Kr.