NextFin News - Jump Trading is expanding its office space in Hong Kong's International Finance Centre, the latest proprietary trading firm to commit to the city's Central district even as Hong Kong policymakers exclude prop traders from new tax concessions on performance fees. The move, reported on September 5, 2026, deepens the Chicago-based firm's presence in one of Asia's most expensive office towers and places it alongside a wave of quantitative rivals that have signed some of the largest leases in the district in a decade.
Specific terms of Jump's expansion — including the number of floors, square footage and rental rate — were not disclosed in the report and were not confirmed by the firm. Jump Trading Hong Kong Limited is already registered at Room 2002, Level 20, One International Finance Centre, according to the Hong Kong stock exchange's participant registry, so the expansion builds on an existing foothold in the IFC complex rather than marking a first entry into the city.
A Crowded Tower, and a Crowded Strategy
The address matters because the IFC has become the preferred coordinate for the new generation of quantitative trading firms in Asia. The complex, comprising One and Two International Finance Centre, offers almost 3 million square feet of prime Central office space with unusually large floorplates — the kind of contiguous space a trading floor needs for rows of engineers, researchers and low-latency infrastructure. Two International Finance Centre, the 88-storey, 412-metre tower that is Hong Kong's second-tallest building, alone contains 22 high-ceiling trading floors.
Qube Research & Technologies agreed in December 2025 to take up to 146,000 square feet across six floors previously occupied by UBS at Two International Finance Centre, a deal that data provider JLL said would make Qube the largest tenant in the IFC complex when its lease begins in the first quarter of 2027. Citadel leased the tower's 59th floor, adding 22,000 square feet, while market maker Citadel Securities also took space in the building. The IFC's ownership mix — floors held by Sun Hung Kai Properties, Henderson Land, MTR Corp and Towngas — means there are several landlords to negotiate with, but availability in the tower is tight: with Qube, Citadel and now Jump all in or entering the building, the remaining contiguous trading-floor space is scarce.
Jump's global footprint has been expanding in parallel. In May 2026 the firm signed a 99,305-square-foot lease at Related Companies' 50 Hudson Yards in New York, a move reported to roughly double its Manhattan footprint. Headcount has followed the bricks and mortar: workforce-analytics firm Revelio Labs estimated Jump's global staff at 2,137 in 2026, up 4.1% from 1,822 a year earlier, with engineering the fastest-growing function. The firm operates across asset classes and time zones from 13 offices in eight countries, including Chicago, New York, London, Singapore, Shanghai, Mumbai, Sydney and Amsterdam. Hong Kong is one of the few Asian locations on that list, alongside Singapore, Shanghai, Mumbai and India's GIFT City — a geographic spread that gives Jump options if any single jurisdiction's policy turns against it.
Founded in 1999 by Paul Gurinas and Bill Disomma, two former pit traders who met in the Deutsche Mark pit at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, Jump has been privately funded throughout its existence and does not manage outside capital. That structure matters for the tax story: because the firm trades its own balance sheet across futures, options, crypto and equities, it falls on the excluded side of Hong Kong's new carried-interest rules. The firm has nonetheless invested heavily in the infrastructure that makes location matter — including, in 2013, a Belgian microwave tower once owned by NATO, purchased to shave milliseconds off European trading routes.
"Hong Kong has been viewed as a key regional and global hub since Qube's inception, and the move reflects the firm's confidence in the city's long-term prospects," said Murray Steel, Qube's Asia-Pacific chief operating officer, in a statement on the firm's IFC lease.
Why Hong Kong, and Why Now
The timing is not accidental. Hong Kong's Central office market is emerging from a seven-year slump, and the district's vacancy rate fell for a third consecutive month to 9.9% in February 2026, according to property consultant JLL. That compared with a citywide vacancy rate of 13.4% and 19.5% in the Kowloon East district. Rents in Central rose 3.5% in the first two months of 2026 alone — a sharp reversal for a district where landlords spent most of the 2020s conceding rent-free periods and fit-out allowances to keep tenants.
The catalyst sits upstream, in the capital markets. Hong Kong's IPO market staged a blockbuster year in 2025, with funds raised jumping 231% to $37 billion. A crowded pipeline of new listings is shaping the current year, and the activity is spilling from trading floors into office towers. New listings need market makers, prime brokers, derivatives hedging and liquidity — the exact services quantitative trading firms sell, and the reason their Asia hiring tends to lead, rather than follow, the property cycle.
"Companies are coming because of the capital markets, definitely," said Sam Gourlay, JLL's Hong Kong head of office leasing advisory. "Most of the new spaces have been filled up, and now it's become a landlord market where people are fighting for high-quality offices."
Rents in greater Central edged up 1.6% to HK$77.60 per square foot per month, while the most prime towers rose 2.5% quarter on quarter, according to Cushman & Wakefield. CBRE expects new grade-A supply to ease in 2026 and 2027, which would tighten availability further in the district's top buildings. Market sources put current Two IFC rents in the region of HK$120 to HK$130 per square foot per month, well above the greater-Central average — the premium that top-tier trading floors are willing to pay for a trophy address.
Jane Street's build-out shows how fast the competitive set is moving. In April 2025 the New York-based market maker was negotiating with landlord Hongkong Land to lease two more floors at Chater House in Central, which would have taken it to six floors and more than 110,000 square feet, up from just two-and-a-half floors a year earlier. By June 2026 it had gone much further, agreeing to lease 223,437 square feet at Henderson Land's Central Yards project along the Central waterfront — the largest leasing transaction in the district in a decade — at an estimated HK$137 per square foot, or roughly HK$4 million per month, with handover expected in 2027 and the lease beginning in 2028. Point72, run by Steven Cohen, agreed in February 2026 to lease 55,000 square feet across four floors at The Henderson on Murray Road, later raising that commitment to around 85,000 square feet, a 162% increase from its existing footprint at Chater House.
The Tax Headwind Firms Are Choosing to Ignore
There is a deliberate contradiction at the heart of this expansion wave. On June 12, 2026, Hong Kong gazetted the Inland Revenue (Amendment) (Preferential Tax Regimes for Funds, Family-owned Investment Holding Vehicles and Carried Interest) Bill 2026, designed to attract more funds and family offices by enhancing concessionary tax treatment for carried interest. The bill received its first reading in the Legislative Council on June 24.
Two months later, on August 12, a spokesperson for the Financial Services and the Treasury Bureau drew a bright line: "remuneration distributed by proprietary trading businesses does not qualify for tax concessions proposed under the Inland Revenue (Amendment) Bill 2026." The bureau explained that under the Inland Revenue Ordinance, a fund must generally satisfy the requirement that participating persons do not have day-to-day control over property management. "A business trading or holding assets using proprietary capital to generate profits for its own account – commonly known as proprietary trading – fails to meet this definition," the statement said.
The policy choice is unambiguous: Hong Kong is courting private-equity and hedge-fund managers who run outside capital, while leaving firms that trade their own balance sheet to the standard profits-tax regime. Jump sits squarely on the excluded side of that line, as do Jane Street, Citadel Securities and the other prop-oriented market makers now signing Central leases.
The firms are signing long-dated leases anyway. That willingness to commit capital while locked out of the tax break suggests they are underwriting a different calculation: access to talent, proximity to Asia's trading hours, and a bet that Hong Kong's capital-markets rebound will outlast the property cycle. For a quantitative firm, a tax concession on carried interest is less valuable than it is for a private-equity manager — prop traders are typically paid through salary and bonus structures rather than carried interest, so the concession's exclusion bites less than the headline suggests. The real cost of Hong Kong for these firms is not the tax rate; it is the difficulty of hiring and retaining quantitative talent in a city competing with Singapore, Dubai and New York for the same people.
Cyclical Property Rebound or Structural Shift in Trading Capacity?
The central question is whether this is a cyclical office-market rebound or a structural repositioning of global trading capacity into Hong Kong. The evidence points to both, operating on different time horizons — and confusing the two is the fastest way to misread the signal.
On the cyclical side, the office market is simply mean-reverting after a seven-year decline. Vacancy is falling from depressed levels, rents are recovering from a low base, and a strong IPO year has pulled demand forward. History offers a cautionary parallel: contemporaneous market reports put prime Two IFC rents near HK$150 per square foot in 2007, before the global financial crisis emptied floors across Central. Vacancy in the district did not begin a sustained recovery until 2026. Hong Kong's property cycles have a habit of overshooting on the way up and correcting on the way down, and the 2027–2028 handover dates on the new quant leases land squarely in the window where a cyclical peak would be most visible.
On the structural side, the composition of the tenants is different. This wave is led by quantitative and proprietary trading firms — Jump, Jane Street, Qube, Citadel, Point72 — whose business models are theoretically location-flexible but practically talent-intensive. These firms do not need to sit next to investment-banking clients. They need low-latency infrastructure, engineers, and researchers willing to work Asia hours. Once a critical mass of that talent cluster forms in a city, it is sticky in a way that a cyclical leasing boom is not: people do not relocate their lives for a one-year rent cycle, and a firm that has hired 50 researchers in Hong Kong cannot pick them up and move them to Singapore without losing a meaningful share of the team.
The second-order effect is where the story sharpens. A cluster of quantitative trading firms in one district does not just consume office space; it tightens the local labour market for a very specific skill set. When five prop trading firms are hiring quantitative researchers, engineers and traders in the same city at the same time, compensation rises faster than the headline rent roll, and poaching becomes the dominant form of competition. That dynamic benefits the workers and the landlords, but it squeezes the firms' margins — which is precisely why these expansions only make sense if the firms expect Asia's share of global trading volume to keep rising. A lease is a fixed cost; a talent war is an escalating one.
But the structural read has a hard ceiling: the tax exclusion. If Hong Kong is unwilling to extend the carried-interest concession to proprietary trading firms, it is signalling that it wants asset managers more than it wants prop traders. A firm can sign a lease without a tax break; it will not move its most profitable books of business into a higher-tax jurisdiction when Singapore and Dubai are competing for the same desks. Singapore has spent years building a favourable regime for fund managers and family offices, and it remains the default alternative for any trading firm weighing an Asia hub.
The falsifying signal is concrete. If two or more of the firms now signing Hong Kong leases announce relocations of trading desks or senior investment staff out of the city within the next 18 to 24 months — or if the carried-interest regime is amended to include proprietary trading and firms still do not expand headcount — the structural thesis is wrong, and this is a cyclical property play dressed in growth clothing.
What to Watch
In the short term, the office market will tighten further. With new grade-A supply expected to ease and hedge funds and private banks forecast to remain the most active tenants, landlords in Central hold the leverage. Jump's expansion, like Jane Street's and Qube's before it, adds to the competition for the district's remaining prime floors, and any firm arriving after 2027 will be paying the price this wave has set.
Over the medium term, the test is headcount, not square footage. Office leases are easy to sign; hiring quantitative researchers, engineers and traders is hard. The firms that follow through on recruitment will validate the expansion. Those that sign leases but keep headcount flat will reveal the move as a prestigious address rather than a growth commitment. Job-posting data and campus-recruiting activity in Hong Kong, Singapore and Shanghai will be the earliest tell — well before any headcount number is published.
In the long term, the outcome hinges on policy. The carried-interest bill continues through the Legislative Council. An amendment extending the concession to proprietary trading firms would remove the largest headwind facing firms like Jump. A confirmation of the exclusion would cap how much trading capacity the city can attract, no matter how many leases get signed. The second variable to watch is Singapore: if the city-state tightens its own regime for trading firms while Hong Kong keeps the door shut, the gap narrows and Hong Kong's leverage grows. If Singapore liberalises further, the pressure on Hong Kong to reconsider becomes harder to ignore.
Base case: Central consolidates its recovery through 2027, with quantitative trading firms absorbing the bulk of prime office supply and rents grinding higher, while headcount grows steadily but not explosively. Upside case: the tax regime is widened to include proprietary trading, or Singapore's regime tightens, triggering a second wave of desk relocations from Singapore and London that pushes Hong Kong toward a genuine structural trading hub. Downside case: the IPO pipeline thins, the property rebound proves cyclical, and firms sublet portions of their new space as the 2027–2028 handover dates arrive, leaving the IFC with a wave of sublease listings just as the cycle turns.
The takeaway: Jump Trading's IFC expansion is less a bet on Hong Kong's office market than a bet on Hong Kong's capital markets — and the two do not always move together. The leases are signed. Headcount, and tax policy, will decide whether they were early or expensive.
Explore more exclusive insights at nextfin.ai.
