XY Capital

XY Capital is a systematic arbitrage proprietary trading firm and asset manager, headquartered in Hong Kong with a second office in London. It was founded in Hong Kong in 2016 by its CEO, Alvin Chan, and started out as a proprietary trading firm running equity and options strategies in the Asia-Pacific markets. In 2020 it set up its European entity in London, XY Capital Europe Limited.

The firm looks for complex market structures and arbitrage opportunities in Asia-Pacific and EMEA markets, and takes a rigorous mathematical approach to pricing securities and building portfolios. Its motto is “One percent better each day”.

Trading runs on XY’s own quantitative models and trading systems. Its job ads describe a Python-heavy environment on Linux, with Docker and Nomad for deployment, ClickHouse, MySQL and PostgreSQL for data, Kafka, Solace and ZMQ for messaging, FIX connectivity, and Grafana and Prometheus for monitoring.

What XY Capital Trades

• XY Prop
  The proprietary trading business. It trades the firm’s own capital in Asia-Pacific equities, futures and options, using quantitative strategies built by dedicated research teams, and it is also where new ideas are tested first.
• XY Asset Management
  Launched in 2021, it runs a quantitative statistical arbitrage strategy in China A-shares that aims to be neutral to the market and to common risk factors. The Hong Kong entity is licensed by the SFC for asset management, and research is under way to extend the strategy to other Asian and emerging equity markets.

Culture and Benefits

XY is organised in three teams: Trading and Research, where traders control the proprietary trading system and manage risk; Technology; and Operations, which covers the trade life cycle, reporting, legal, compliance and risk management. The firm’s values are excellence, teamwork, proactivity and innovation, and it describes its culture as very collaborative, with a lot of problem solving and sharing of ideas, and people who learn quickly and are rewarded for hard work. XY publishes few details on benefits. Interns get a fully stocked pantry and an invitation to the weekly trading and research meetings, with a chance to present their own ideas.

Hiring at XY Capital

The main entry route is a 10-week summer internship in Quant Research and Trading, run in both Hong Kong and London. The 2027 programme is open to STEM undergraduate, master’s and PhD students graduating in 2027 or in summer 2028. Strong Python is required, you need the right to work in the country of the office, and interns are considered for a graduate role afterwards. Applications for 2027 close in October 2026. Experienced roles, mostly in technology, are advertised on the careers page as they open.

XY publishes its selection process for the internship, which runs in three steps:

• Online test
  A numerical, analytical and programming test.
• Technical interview
  One interview with members of the team.
• Final interview
  One interview with the firm’s management.

Earlier cycles also included an HR video interview before the technical round. Candidate reports on XY are scarce, so the best preparation is to practise numerical and analytical test questions under time pressure and to be comfortable using Python for data analysis.