Professional experience

Mr. de Quillacq started his professional career with options trading at Société Générale, the world’s leading derivatives house, where he managed the Swedish and the Dutch single stock option trading activities, before being promoted to the German stock-option activity. During these formative years, Mr. de Quillacq gained an excellent understanding of financial derivatives in general, the specific experience of volatility trading, as well as a solid grounding in trading.

Soon after, he rebuilt Société Générale’s FTSE index-arbitrage activity, completely overhauling the trading approach, business model and technology infrastructure, following the introduction of SETS electronic order-book. Gontran overcame two complete failures of the front-office system for risks and PL, while maintaining production on the largest cash-and-carry position in the City of London (£2.5 billion). He beat all profit targets by several multiples, and ranked one of the best index-arbers in the City by authorities and competitors alike.

Mr. de Quillacq was hired in 2000 to build Lehman Brother’s European arbitrage activity. He reinvented the desk as a global DeltaOne franchise, while enhancing the desk’s infrastructure. Gontran organized and traded new product lines: ETFs, Swaps, Sector Derivatives, structured notes… He created the first, atypical and eye-catching non-volatilistic structuration activity, notably creating the first securitized alphas instruments (also called “portable alphas”, “smart betas”, “risk premia“, “derivatives on strategies” or “fund derivatives”), contributing a significant part of Lehman’s European equity derivatives franchise.

In 2004, Gontran joined Tykhe Capital, a renown multi-strategy hedge fund in NY, trading convertible bonds and credit derivatives on a proprietary basis. He established the listed option activity, before developing a statistical arbitrage strategy between the equity volatility and credit domains (“structure arbitrage”).

Mr. de Quillacq joined Nomura, Japan’s largest bank, in 2006, leading the US equity derivatives customer franchise. He developed new proprietary trading strategies, while simultaneously working on the derivatives group’s legal, technical and distribution infrastructure.

In 2007, he joined HSBC to build a new activity around custom non-standard derivatives and portable alphas. His responsibilities encompassed trading, quantitative research, marketing strategy, structuring, market-making and risk management. He became co-head of the exotic correlation activity and turned a money-loosing business into a $85 m / year success. He then built a highly automated US ‘delta one activity’, turning HSBC from inexistent into a strong player in the field of index swaps in less than two years.

After some consulting missions as a derivatives Subject Matter Expert, both for consulting firms (SSG, GLG) and as an independent contractor, he became an investment consultant in 2014 at The Atlantic Group. He managed the Quantitative & Risk Search Practice at IJC partners of the firm the following year. His due diligence on investment strategies were renown in the industry for their depth and time-saving value to CIOs. He launched Navesink International LLC in early 2016 an independent boutique with enhanced reviews and selections of investment principals and strategies.

In 2017, he co-founded a quantitative investment group, deploying the latest machine learning techniques in long/short equities, partnering with the Clinton Group.

In 2019-20 he has been the Chief Operating Officer and the quantitative analyst in a hedge fund handling volatility arbitrage for a large institutional investor.

Mr. de Quillacq is a member, attendant and speaker of/at quantitative investment / risk / networking societies: IAQF, QWAFAxNEW, SQA, PRMIA, GARP…

Academic Excellence

Mr. de Quillacq attained advanced levels in physics in the world’s best academic centers: “math sup” & “math spé”, masters in theoretical physics at the Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon (ranking third) and the doctoral level at the Ecole Supérieure d’Electricité (Now CentraleSupélec). He was a full-time university junior professor at age 20.

Mr. de Quillacq simultaneously participated in leading research experiments: in nuclear physics at the Oliver Lodge Laboratory, in atomic physics at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) and in differential algebra at UC Berkeley. He taught at university, as well as graduated as an officer from military academy (Ecole du Train et de la Logistique Opérationnelle).

Gontran completed soon after France’s best business degree (5 year HEC diploma / BS+MS of Management) in two years only, with a major in Finance.

He has three children, and resides in the New York tri-state area.

Downloadable biography