IMC plans to grow its Hong Kong team to about twice its current size over the next two years, starting from 44 employees. Senior leaders say the city is becoming the firm's Asia hub for systematic equities trading, putting Hong Kong at the center of that strategy.
As hiring restarted in early 2025, IMC initially targeted a second base for its Asia-Pacific systematic equities unit. That quickly widened, with Hong Kong staff set to work in concert with Sydney across options, exchange-traded funds and futures. The firm also intends to invest in building artificial intelligence capabilities in the city. IMC runs a mix of market-making and proprietary trading - deploying its own capital - and the Hong Kong build-out supports both.
IMC's Hong Kong workforce has expanded nearly tenfold since early 2025, marking a sharp rebound after a prior consolidation. The office previously climbed to nearly 80 employees in 2012 before Asia-Pacific trading was centralized in Sydney. Sydney is now IMC's largest location in the region, with roughly 400 people spanning trading, research, engineering and support.
In early 2025, Citadel and Citadel Securities alum Andrew Fong took on the role of managing director, assuming leadership of the Hong Kong office. "Once we started hiring, we found strong people across options, ETFs and futures, alongside systematic equities," Fong said. "So Hong Kong now hires for all of them."
Three IMC partners have relocated from Sydney to Hong Kong this year. Among them are Davis Cochrane and Jack Kennedy, who respectively run trading and research for Asia-Pacific systematic equities as co-leads. Max Jacenko also relocated, overseeing the region's delta-one platform from a software engineering standpoint. A standout recent addition is Lawrence Lu, now heading Asia-Pacific low-frequency commodity futures trading, after commodity roles at Qube Research and Technologies and China International Capital Corp.
The pipeline is still active. About 10 new hires have signed on to start in the coming months, including senior ETF traders and options researchers. IMC's careers page shows more than a dozen openings in Hong Kong, spanning positions that range from a quant research internship through machine learning engineering, along with high-frequency commodity futures research, trading and institutional sales.
Other recent regional hires include Kelly Sze, appointed senior compliance officer in July after leading Asia-Pacific compliance at XTX Markets, and Thomas Choi, who came aboard in December as the Asia-Pacific head of treasury after running regional portfolio finance at Schonfeld Strategic Advisors.
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IMC first planted a flag in Hong Kong in 2006, gaining approval the next year as a licensed market maker on the local exchange and initially trading index and single-stock options. In the early phase, the team was heavily built around traders and engineers, drawing both local talent and transfers.
A previous shift toward Sydney had pared the Hong Kong office back to a small core, including responsible officers and engineers needed to keep its market-making on the exchange operating. In 2021, the firm staffed one Hong Kong role dedicated to its direct counterparty operation, executing transactions with institutions such as pension funds and insurers without broker intermediaries.
The market tailwind is real. In 2025, a record year, Hong Kong became the world's leading market for initial share offerings, and Bloomberg data show that the main board's average daily turnover also reached a new peak. In 2026, Hong Kong ranked second globally for IPO capital raised, Chief Executive John Lee said this month, even with competition from the US and mega listings such as SpaceX's $86.25 billion deal.
Meanwhile, the talent race in proprietary trading has intensified. Jane Street employs nearly 600 staff across Asia Pacific, operates one of the region's largest ETF trading desks, is regarded as a top-tier market maker across Taiwan, Hong Kong, Australia and Japan, and is ramping up participation in ETFs that trade on exchanges in mainland China, Singapore and South Korea. IMC's build-out sits alongside rivals including Jane Street Group and Citadel Securities, bolstering the recovery in Hong Kong's office market while drawing on the region's substantial talent base.
"We're seeing more opportunity across Asia right now than at any point in the last decade, and Hong Kong is one of the places we're building to capture it," said Matthew Benney, IMC's head of Asia Pacific. That explains the hiring binge, partner relocations and the broader mandate in Hong Kong across systematic equities, options, ETFs and futures, plus AI investment.
For investors, more market makers and prop shops leaning into Hong Kong can mean thicker liquidity and tighter spreads, especially with the surge in 2025 turnover and ongoing IPO activity. The tangible signals: IMC's plan to roughly double staff from 44 over two years, around 10 new hires on the way, and a slate of open roles. The bottom line: watch how this build-out shows up in volumes and price efficiency on the Hong Kong exchange.
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