Matthew Austin filed suit against the Canadian bank’s US securities arm on Monday in federal court in New York. He claimed Toronto-Dominion was wrongfully trying to enforce the “overbroad” non-compete despite breaching the terms of the deal by which he joined the bank in February 2024.
According to his complaint, Austin was recruited to Toronto-Dominion under explicit promises that he would be allowed to implement a trading strategy “built around algorithms, models, and alpha signals” that would be executed through the bank’s sales and trading desk. But a week after the strategy was launched in April 2025, more than half of the desk was fired, Austin alleges.
The new desk head allegedly told Austin’s colleagues that he preferred not to run the strategy because “he knew where the market was headed” and that other members of the team were “not bought in.”
A spokesman for Toronto-Dominion declined to comment on the suit. A lawyer for Austin didn’t respond to a telephone message seeking further comment.
After Toronto-Dominion shut down his strategy in July, Austin claims the bank refused to clarify how he would be paid, telling him to “trust” management. When Austin discussed resigning, his managers allegedly suggested at first that they wanted him to stay. But they subsequently refused his request to have his own team to execute his strategy, telling him his employment was a “take it or leave it” situation, according to the suit.
Following his Aug. 25 resignation, Toronto-Dominion sought to enforce the non-compete, “restraining him from pursuing his livelihood in the financial industry” and causing him “lost income, deferred compensation, health coverage costs and reputational harm,” Austin said in his suit.
Each day that he remains unemployed, Austin added, “his skill set deteriorates due to the fast-paced, evolving nature of the field of quantitative finance.”
According to Austin’s LinkedIn profile, he was a vice president in credit trading at Goldman Sachs Group Inc. from June 2021 to January 2024. A Harvard Ph.D. in biostatistics, Austin also previously worked at quantitative firms AJO Partners, which shut down in 2020, and Numeric Investors LLC, which was acquired by Man Group Plc in 2014.
The case is Austin v TD Securities (USA) LLC, 25-cv-7866, US District Court, Southern District of New York.
(Updates with additional detail from complaint, biographical information.)
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