Global Quantitative Strategies

Apollo looks beyond New York as it plans second headquarters. The prominent private capital firm wants to build a new office in a southern US state as it continues to grow Published7 hours ago Unlock the Editor's Digest for free Apollo Global Management will establish a second US headquarters in the American South, where the bulk of its future hires will be based. Apollo joins a small group of elite New York-based finance firms looking to make a major commitment to a Sunbelt state. It has been considering Austin, Texas, south Florida and Nashville, according to multiple people familiar with the matter. The firm recently surveyed their partners and managing directors over their location preferences. "We've shared with our teams across Apollo and Athene that we plan to establish a second headquarters in either Texas or south Florida, alongside NYC," Apollo wrote in a statement after an FT inquiry. "This decision is driven by the talent we want to hire and the firm we want to be. New York does not have a monopoly on talent, and we expect most of our future growth will take place in our second HQ." Since its founding in 1990, the firm has been based in New York City. Its main office for two decades has been at Solow Building at 9 West 57th Street, a top property in Midtown Manhattan adjacent to Central Park. Apollo has a smaller office in the Bryant Park area of Manhattan. Since the pandemic, Apollo has created significant offices in Greenwich, Connecticut as well as in Miami and Palm Beach, Florida. The number of employees at the private capital titan, which manages more than $900bn, has swelled to more than 4,000, according to its most recent annual report. This is up from 1,700 at the end of 2020, just prior to its acquisition of the life insurance provider Athene. Texas and Florida are known for their low tax rates as well as conservative, pro-business politicians. Such firms as Citadel and Elliott Management have relocated at least a co-headquarters to Florida. Large US banks such as Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan have built big operations in the Dallas area. Austin, Texas has traditionally been a hub for technology companies. Landing Apollo, which has been one of the fastest-growing alternative asset managers and leaders in private credit, would be a coup for whichever city it selects. Most New York financial services companies have yet to move their most elite executives and rainmakers to smaller cities given the advantage of being close to counterparties as well as lawyers and bankers in Manhattan. Executives have also said junior talent prefers to be in New York City. The Wall Street community has warned that financial services companies could flee if the new New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani succeeded in persuading the state's legislature to raise personal and corporate taxes, which Mamdani said is essential to close the city's looming budget deficit and fund an expansion in social services. Still, in recent weeks large employers such as American Express and Bank of America have made large commitments to add to their respective real estate footprints in America's largest city. Convincing top executives and employees to move to any new city - and potentially uproot their families - could prove difficult. The timeline for selecting and building the second headquarters was not clear nor which existing executives currently based in New York, if any, would make the move.

Neel Somani discusses the energy market design and how pricing actually works. Licensed Image from Google AI Labs March 24, 2026 When the temperature drops in New England and heating bills spike without warning, most people assume the utility company is simply taking advantage of winter demand. Neel Somani, a researcher and former quantitative analyst at Citadel, says that the real answer is more systemic. The last megawatt rule. The first thing to know about electricity pricing, according to Somani, is a principle that surprises most people upon first encountering it. "The price for power is based on the last megawatt of power that's produced," he explains. This is known in energy economics as marginal cost pricing, and it governs nearly every competitive power market in the United States. In practice, this means that the cost of electricity at any given moment is not the average of all the generators running on the grid. It is determined entirely by the most expensive, least efficient generator required to meet current demand. Every producer on the grid, from a zero-marginal-cost wind farm to a decades-old oil peaker plant, gets paid that same rate. The efficient generators pocket the difference as profit. The inefficient ones break even. And consumers pay whatever it costs to keep the lights on. Discover more SRI Portfolio Management This design is not an accident. It reflects a deliberate governance choice, one that encourages investing in cheaper generation over time by rewarding efficiency. But it also creates dramatic price swings when demand pushes the grid toward its most expensive resources. A regional case study: New England. New England provides an unusually clear example of how fuel competition, infrastructure constraints, and pricing rules combine to create electricity bills that leave residents asking hard questions every January. The generation stack in New England runs roughly in order from cheapest to most expensive: renewables, nuclear (specifically the Millstone plant in Connecticut), natural gas, and finally oil. Oil generators are rarely discussed in most power markets because, as Somani notes, they are extraordinarily inefficient. They are the backup of backups, the kind of generator that sits idle for most of the year waiting for conditions that almost never arrive. Winter changes that calculus entirely. "In the winter in New England, natural gas has to be used to heat homes. If you don't heat your home, your pipes can freeze, and that's super expensive to fix." The result is a fixed, inelastic demand for natural gas that is driven entirely by survival, not by price. Households will pay nearly anything to keep their homes warm. Discover more Books & Literature Eco-Friendly Products When residential heating consumes too much of the available natural gas supply, there simply isn't enough left over to run the region's gas-fired power plants at full capacity. The grid operator, facing a shortfall, has no choice but to call on those rarely used oil generators. And because the price of power is set by the most expensive unit running, the entire grid price shoots upward the moment oil comes online. The gas market amplifier. When oil generators are running and getting paid the oil-based electricity price, any natural gas that can be burned in a gas generator becomes enormously valuable. A natural gas seller sitting at the Algonquin hub, the key pricing point for New England, can see exactly what is happening. They know that their buyer can burn natural gas, generate electricity at the oil price, and pocket a substantial profit on the spread. "It's in your interest to keep raising the natural gas price," Somani explains, "until it's basically the same cost to produce a megawatt of power from a natural gas unit as it is to produce a megawatt of power from an oil unit." The natural gas seller will push the price up to that ceiling because charging less leaves money on the table, and charging more loses the sale entirely. The market settles at a new offset, one in which both oil and gas generators earn roughly equivalent returns and consumers pay for all of it. This compounding effect is what makes New England winters so financially punishing. It is not simply that one expensive fuel comes online. It is that its arrival reprices every other fuel in the stack. The California contrast. The California power market operates under a different set of rules and faces a distinct set of challenges, but the underlying logic of incentive design runs through it just as clearly. Neel Somani points to solar power as a defining feature of the California grid, one that creates its own pricing patterns. During daylight hours, California's abundant solar capacity sharply lowers the marginal cost of electricity, sometimes to zero or even negative values. Solar plants continue to generate even at negative prices because they receive renewable energy credits, making production financially rational regardless of spot market prices. The grid floods with cheap power while most residents are at work. Then the sun sets. "Everyone turns on their power all at once," Somani notes, "and then the price spikes." The transition from solar-heavy afternoons to peak-demand evenings has become one of the most drastic price movements in American power markets, a pattern so consistent that it has its own name among traders: the duck curve. The solution the market has developed is largely storage-based. Batteries buy cheap solar power during the afternoon and sell it back during the evening peak, capturing the spread as profit. From a market design perspective, this is the system working as intended: price signals creating investment incentives that, over time, smooth out the volatility that generated them. What energy teaches about governance. For Neel Somani, the value of understanding these markets extends well beyond electricity bills. The same principles that govern power pricing, marginal cost dynamics, incentive alignment, and compounding systemic effects apply across complex market systems, from financial derivatives to pharmaceutical pricing to digital advertising. "I try to be very thoughtful and driven by economics," Somani has said, describing an analytical framework he applies consistently across domains. The energy market is simply one of the most legible examples of how governance rules shape real-world outcomes. The choice to price electricity at marginal cost rather than average cost is a policy decision with enormous distribution consequences. Leaders who understand these structural dynamics are better positioned to anticipate how systems will behave under stress, where price spikes will concentrate, and which interventions will actually change outcomes rather than simply shift costs around. Somani's instinct to trace incentives back to their structural source is what separates his analysis from conventional commentary. Becca Stickler is a freelance writer with a focus on sustainability and eco-friendly living. Eco-Friendly Products You may like.

Citadel taps Morgan Stanley for credit trader. New hire spent almost a decade at the investment bank, working across various credit-related roles. Antonia von Specht has joined Citadel in London as a credit trader after nearly 10 years at Morgan Stanley. She brings extensive experience working across credit sales to her new role at the hedge fund, and most recently served as a vice president at Morgan Stanley, working across the hedge fund and banks offering. Having initially joined the sell-side investment bank in 2016 as an analyst, von Specht later became an associate, covering Germany and Nordics-focused credit sales before being promoted to her most recent role. Previously in her career, she also gained early industry experience at Deutsche Bank. Citadel had not responded to a request for comment at the time of publication. The appointment follows further significant developments for Citadel in recent months. In January 2026, the firm promoted Brian Pastor as head of trading, global equities after an almost eight-year tenure. Similarly, in December 2025, Virginie Saade, managing director and head of government and regulatory policy, EMEA, at Citadel joined EuroCTP's advisory committee, to support the development of the upcoming EU equities consolidated tape. Commerzbank hires structured credit trader. Appointment marks a return to the German-based firm, after stints at Morgan Stanley and BNP Paribas CIB. Vadim Nechaev has joined German bank Commerzbank as a structured credit trader, based out of London. Nechaev has worked across the sell-side for more than a decade, with key expertise in credit trading and European markets. His appointment at Commerzbank marks a return to the firm, which he had initially joined in September 2016 as a XVA and legacy credit trader, before working his way up the ranks to become a structured credit trader in the Treasury investment office. Following this, he had two year-long stints at Morgan Stanley and BNP Paribas CIB, working as a credit default swap (CDS) trader at both firms, before now returning to Commerzbank. Previously in his career, he gained early industry experience working as a credit research analyst at Bank of America Merrill Lynch.