Quant Finance Jobs in Toronto and Montreal

Waterloo and McGill feed graduates into Chicago and New York trading firms, since Toronto and Montreal host few standalone prop trading desks.

Toronto and Montreal supply a disproportionate number of graduates to the options and systematic trading firms covered elsewhere in this series, but the two cities host comparatively few standalone prop trading offices themselves, and a candidate should understand that most Canadian graduates in this field end up relocating rather than staying local. The domestic route runs mainly through the major Canadian banks and a smaller set of quantitative asset managers, while the market-making and multi-manager roles this site otherwise covers are typically based in Chicago, New York, or London.

Options and futures market making concentrates around the exchanges where the underlying products trade, principally the CME and CBOE in Chicago, and running a separate Canadian trading desk offers little advantage when Toronto's own derivatives exchange volumes are much smaller. As a result, firms such as Jump Trading and DRW Trading, both of which recruit heavily from the University of Waterloo, generally hire Canadian graduates directly into their Chicago or New York offices rather than opening a Toronto trading floor, and a candidate should expect relocation to be part of the offer from the outset.

Montreal's position is somewhat different because of the city's academic strength in machine learning research, which has drawn a number of technology and quantitative research functions to the city even where the firm's actual trading book sits elsewhere, and some quantitative research and infrastructure roles tied to these functions are based locally.

Royal Bank of Canada, Toronto-Dominion Bank, and the other major Canadian banks run substantial quantitative research, trading, and risk teams from Toronto, and these desks are the most realistic path to a domestic quantitative role without relocating, covering fixed income, equity derivatives, and increasingly systematic and electronic trading strategies. Compensation and role scope at the Canadian banks trail the top US and UK prop trading firms, but the roles offer a genuinely local career path for candidates who prefer to stay in Canada.

These roles are also a realistic option for candidates who prefer not to relocate for family or immigration reasons, and a strong performance inside a Canadian bank's quantitative team can still lead to an internal transfer into the bank's larger New York or London trading operations for a candidate who later decides to pursue that path.