Wall Street keeps raising salaries to compete - but the Chinese hedge fund Ubiquant is beating them out for talent by offering $300,000 to entry-level employees

• Chinese hedge fund Ubiquant is offering $300,000 starting salaries to snag top graduates as the industry's talent pool dwindles.
• It told Bloomberg that it hired 10 new graduates in 2020, and that its yearly applicants jumped to 300.
• CEO Wang Chen said that he's offered $1 million salaries to more experienced hires, and gives incentives of up to $1.5 million to top performers.

As pay raise fever sweeps Wall Street firms, Chinese hedge fund Ubiquant is trumping them all by offering starting salaries of up to $300,000 for top fresh graduates.

For comparison, companies like Morgan Stanley are offering around $100,000 to $110,000 to new hires, even after hiking pay for junior analysts this month.

"If we think someone is worth hiring, we will try to hire them, sparing no effort," Ubiquant founder Wang Chen told Bloomberg.

The company's starting offers have even enticed some new hires to drop their US grad school enrollments for a job at the Beijing-based fund.

Tech graduates are particularly sought after by firms that use computer models to scout investments and trade, like D.E. Shaw and Two Sigma in the US. But the industry is facing a crunch for top talent among its junior hires, pushing some firms to drop their standards for newcomers.

Quant funds in China also have to contend with tech firms like Alibaba and Bytedance taking up the best graduates.

One way Ubiquant stays competitive is by offering employees a comparitively cushy work experience. Employees told Bloomberg that they start work at 10 in the morning, take naps during their lunch breaks, and finish work at 7 p.m. or 9 p.m., a stark contrast from the "inhumane" work conditions junior analysts say they're subject to in US firms.

Ubiquant manages $8 billion in assets, per Bloomberg.

Other well-known names, like Shanghai MingHong Investment Co and Zhejiang High-Flyer Asset Managemnt, manage $8.5 billion and $10 billion respectively. But they pale when compared to the biggest asset management funds in the US like Blackrock, which has over $1 trillion in holdings.