About SFC Flows

All data comes from the Hong Kong Securities and Futures Commission (SFC) public register, which records every licence granted to or revoked from a financial professional operating in Hong Kong. The register spans from 2003 to the present and covers over 133,000 individuals across 5,000+ regulated entities.

The data is entirely public. SFC Flows scrapes and processes it weekly — no proprietary or non-public information is used.

A career move is inferred when a person's licence at firm A ends and a licence at firm B begins within 2 years (730 days). The longer window is intentional — it captures transitions involving extended non-compete periods, common in hedge funds and senior roles, where professionals may be off the register for 12–18 months before re-licensing at a new firm.

Firms that are subsidiaries of the same parent are grouped together — for example, "Goldman Sachs (Asia) LLC" and "Goldman Sachs Futures" are both treated as part of the Goldman Sachs parent entity. This grouping is determined by an LLM-assisted mapping step reviewed manually for major institutions.

Each firm pair receives a competition score combining three signals:

• Talent flow volume — how many people have moved directly between the two firms in either direction.
• Regulatory activity overlap — Jaccard similarity of the SFC regulated activity types (RA1–RA10) held by staff at each firm.
• Business similarity — cosine similarity of sentence embeddings of LLM-generated firm descriptions.

A higher score means two firms compete for the same talent pool, operate in the same regulated activities, and have similar business profiles. It is not a measure of financial performance or market share.

Each firm is classified into one of: Investment Bank Hedge Fund Broker-Dealer Asset Manager Commercial Bank Private Equity Wealth Management Other

Classification is done in two passes: first by an LLM (Claude) using the firm's name, regulated activities, and staff count; then reviewed and overridden manually for known institutions. Prop trading and HFT firms (Jane Street, Jump Trading, Optiver, Flow Traders, DRW) are classified as Hedge Fund / Quant as the closest available category.

Country and region of origin for each professional is inferred from their name using an LLM (Claude Haiku). This is a probabilistic estimate — it reflects naming conventions, not nationality or citizenship. It is used only for aggregate analytics (workforce composition charts) and individual profile pages.

• The SFC register records licences, not employment contracts. A gap in licensing does not always mean a person left the industry.
• Firm groupings are best-effort. Some subsidiaries may be incorrectly self-mapped or assigned to the wrong parent.
• Classification errors exist, especially for smaller or newer firms.
• Career moves reflect documented licence transitions in the official SFC register. The 730-day window for linking consecutive positions at different firms is a design choice — transitions with longer gaps are not counted.

SFC Flows is built and maintained by Gautier Marti, founder of HKML — Hong Kong's largest quant ML community, since 2018.

This is not investment advice. Past talent flows do not predict future performance.