SIG vs Jump Trading

Had a friend who was in SIG Dublin for a while. They bumped their comp to 250k TC (in euros) for a first-year AT, which is as good as or better than any other European OMM except JS London/CitSec London. If you're coming in as a more experienced hire, TC is more opaque. I'd imagine Jump's starting TC is in the same ballpark. If you're an AT then SIG makes you wait for a year before going to class in Bala, whereas things scale up quicker at Jump in terms of both responsibility and pay. If you decide to attend class you're gonna have to sign a 3-year non-compete which is a fairly major downside of SIG vs Jump. After the non-compete SIG has a relatively socialised pay structure (bonuses aren't as high relative to doing the same work at other firms, or probably as low relative to underperforming) and the contracts are roughly yearly. Coming out of class you're probably earning ~350k euros and it can increase in multiples from there, so the marginal utility of extra bonuses might not be that high.

Main difference is the style of trading. Most desks in SIG Dublin are semi-systematic or even closer to no-code-at-all desks. While SIG does have a variety of roles from extremely high-touch and manual to completely systematised, Jump is basically a software engineering company in finance and systematise everything they do. So your skillset and the work you like doing (coding vs intuition-based training) should play a large part in your decision. SIG places a very high value on open-outcry trading, which someone very systematic won't necessarily be good at, and might hinder you getting to class early. Another thing worth considering is that London and Amsterdam are much better cities than Dublin. Dublin is nearly as expensive as London but with none of the upsides of museums, art, and really nightlife unless you really like pubs. Amsterdam is also better, and cheaper to boot.