Quant manager Qube grows China fund 10-fold to above US$2 billion

Published Tue, Feb 10, 2026 · 12:19 PM

[HONG KONG] Quantitative hedge fund giant Qube Research & Technologies (QRT) grew assets in its China long-only equity fund more than 10-fold over the past year, as more global investors warmed to Asia’s largest market.

The Dao fund has topped US$2 billion, up from around US$190 million about a year ago, according to QRT’s Asia-Pacific chief operating officer, Murray Steel. It’s currently the only fund of four overseen by the more than US$42 billion London-based firm that is open for additional capital, he said.

Investors are looking to add money to China funds at an accelerated pace this year, recent surveys from Goldman Sachs and BNP Paribas showed. Money managers have shaken off concerns about slowing economic growth and rising geopolitical and regulatory uncertainty, opting to add to a market that can offer a way to diversify portfolios.

While a net 42 per cent of investors in the BNP survey said that they pulled money from China hedge funds in 2023, 14 per cent plan to add money to such vehicles this year, up from 9 per cent who actually did so in 2025. Equity long-short and quant were among investors’ preferred strategies for China this year, Marlin Naidoo, the French bank’s London-based global head of capital introduction, said in a recent interview, citing the findings.

QRT is led by Pierre-Yves Morlat and Laurent Laizet, the co-founders who both worked previously at Societe Generale and later at Credit Suisse Group. It was spun out in 2018 as part of a management buyout. It’s since emerged as one of the biggest and fastest growing hedge funds in the whole industry.

Fuelled by new cash and investment returns, QRT’s assets have expanded about 50 per cent in the last 11 months, according to a Bloomberg News calculation. QRT merged two of its funds, Torus and Prism, into a single pool at the end of last year. Torus traded the firm’s futures strategy as well as equities, while Prism included macro bets and futures.

While the other three remaining QRT funds trade globally, Dao is instead marketed as “a gateway to China for the international investor community”.

It uses QRT’s global quant research to trade domestically-listed class-A shares. From the time it began trading at the start of November 2022 to the end of January this year, it returned a cumulative 98 per cent, according to Steel. That topped the CSI All Share Index by 57 percentage points, in dollar terms. The fund outperformed the gauge every year, said Steel, without providing annual numbers.

QRT’s funds generated a 22 per cent return last year, a composite figure weighted by their assets, Steel said.

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The firm in December inked a lease for as much as 146,000 square feet in Hong Kong’s Two International Finance Centre, to accommodate its growing staff in the city. While waiting to move into the space being vacated by UBS Group in the first quarter of 2027, it signed deals for four additional floors in Central Tower earlier last year, expanding its office space in the building by 80 per cent.

QRT has grown to about 2,000 staff worldwide. One-third of those are in the Asia-Pacific region, home to five of its 13 offices, Bloomberg News has previously reported. BLOOMBERG