Things are finally looking up for UK quant fund Winton
If you’ve ever walked through Athens or Rome and felt like you were walking through the ruins of a long-forgotten and maybe superior civilization, then you might capture the same feeling walking through Kensington, the headquarters of the hedge fund known as Winton.
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Accounts were released earlier this week for Winton Capital Management (WCM), the main UK subsidiary for Sir David Harding’s Winton Group. The topline figures for 2025 were pretty good: revenue grew for the second year in a row, from £86m ($115m) to £101m ($135m), and operating profit increased from £10m ($13m) to £14m ($19m).
Not bad, but a far cry from Winton’s highs in the 2010’s. Back in 2014, the fund’s revenue peaked at approximately £631m (around $1bn at the time).
WCM’s headcount told a similar story. 161 souls in 2025 were up on the 157 that the firm employed in 2024, and it was the third consecutive year of headcount growth at the firm. But it was a significant decrease on its mid-2010s highs; the fund boasted 385 people in 2016, a number that halved within just five years.
Was there anything to be optimistic about at Winton? Yes, there was: pay. WCM paid its people an average of £344k ($457k) across 2025, an 11% increase on the £311k ($413k) it paid on average in 2024. It was also a decline on WCM’s all-time highest average pay package, which was £428k ($569k) in 2022, but not quite as drastic a decline as revenue or headcount.
As we have touched on, Winton is far from its glory days. Winton Group Limited, the parent company owned by Sir David, paid out £5.8m ($7.7m) in dividends. Sir David is a majority, but not entire owner of Winton Group Limited; he earned £60m from the firm in 2010 and £87m from it in 2011, according to the Financial Times.
What happened to Winton? The firm profited in its early years from “trend-following”, a rather boring but profitable quantitative strategy that basically aimed to front-run persistent market trends – oil is steadily going up, so buy oil. Sir David switched away from the system in 2018 due to lackluster returns in preceding years, moving to a broader mix of quantitative strategies.
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