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What the interns have wrought, 2020 edition

blog.janestreet.com

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Re: What the interns have wrought, 2020 edition

#211

Post by logicslave12 »

nwsm wrote: post #160
logicslave12 wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you aware of how few people get rich in the hedge fund industry? It’s not much more than people getting rich in Vegas and on lottery tickets

Billions are generated for investors every year by hedge funds. Obviously there are not many Robert Mercers making money by running hedge funds, but there are countless millionaires and billionaires exacerbating their wealth through hedge funds.

In nyc there’s less than 10,000 investing jobs.

You’re talking about a few thousand people a year

Re: What the interns have wrought, 2020 edition

#212

Post by davidu »

maest wrote: post #48
davidu wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The investment side is engineering. If you're talking about IT that makes the printer work, sure.

I cannot speak for Jane Street, in particular, but I have spent many years working at a very similar firm, and Investment is not Technology. There are engineers working in Investment, yes, but the risk profiles, the payout profiles and the focus of their work is very different. Investment deals with getting and analysing data, understanding the market and their algos, coming up with trading ideas, handling their PB r…

It's too hard to fully explain how wrong this is, so just leaving the comment in case someone else reads it and thinks it might be right.

The investors are engineers. Full stop. They write code. The code makes trades. Everything else is noise to support the engineers writing code to make trades.

Re: What the interns have wrought, 2020 edition

#213

Post by erik_seaberg »

cltby wrote: post #176
erik_seaberg wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The HFT needs latency low enough to win a race against B.

If HFT and B are racing for the same order, they evidently have a very similar trading objective. In which case it's bizarre to ascribe some uniquely negative social value to HFT winning that race.

The HFT doesn’t want a position, it’s only trading because it anticipates what B is doing right now and adding cost to the process without improving the result.

Re: What the interns have wrought, 2020 edition

#214

Post by runamok »

jeffbee wrote: post #57
davidu wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know people who work there. That comp data excludes bonuses -- and most importantly -- that employees are able to invest in the proprietary funds themselves, which generate insane returns.

Another thing the HN orthodoxy rejects is that professional investing and trading can make money above monkey-dart levels, despite the abundance of evidence that it does.

It's not just HN. It's generally accepted that over 20 year spans almost no actively managed fund beats index funds.

Example PDF showing this: https://us.spindices.com/documents/spiva/spiva-us-year-end-2...

Re: What the interns have wrought, 2020 edition

#215

Post by kyawzazaw »

rokobobo wrote: post #92
fractionalhare wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In HFT (and often stat arb) the front and back office dichotomy doesn't apply as much. Basically anyone doing nontrivial engineering work has an opportunity to share in the profits of the firm at Jane Street. They don't need to be a quantitative researcher or trader.

In HFT firms algorithm developers are front office as much as traders. (And in some firms, traders don’t even exist as a role.)

which firms don't have traders?

Re: What the interns have wrought, 2020 edition

#216

Post by kyawzazaw »

Smaug123 wrote: post #115
909832 wrote: post #24

Does Jane Street and similar firms hire Math or CS PhDs with backgrounds in theory?

I'm not at Jane Street, but at G-Research (also quant finance). Much as a joke goes which I first heard in the Effective Altruism sphere, our quants come from all kinds of backgrounds: their PhDs are in fluid mechanics, statistical physics, pure maths, you name it!

how easy do they switch to Quant finance? I don't know anything at all but it seems like an entire new field to learn.

Re: What the interns have wrought, 2020 edition

#217

Post by nwsm »

logicslave12 wrote: post #211
nwsm wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Billions are generated for investors every year by hedge funds. Obviously there are not many Robert Mercers making money by running hedge funds, but there are countless millionaires and billionaires exacerbating their wealth through hedge funds.

In nyc there’s less than 10,000 investing jobs. You’re talking about a few thousand people a year

I'm not talking about investing jobs! Investment firms invest other people's money. I'm talking about the profit those other people realize, not the profit the firm or its employees realize through fees and investment of its own capital.

Re: What the interns have wrought, 2020 edition

#218

Post by lowiqengineer »

pb7 wrote: post #116
tcoff91 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are making 3x the median family income for this country while getting to work from home and stay safe from COVID-19. The job market is imploding around us while we work cushy tech jobs. Abject misery abounds as people lose their loved ones and their livelihoods. It comes off as as quite tone-deaf when tech people complain about their $150k salaries. There are way too many entitled people in tech who have never wo…

>It comes off as as quite tone-deaf when tech people complain about their $150k salaries. There are way too many entitled people in tech who have never worked a shit minimum wage job in their lives. Seems quite tone-deaf to compare yourself to the worst off. It's easy to pat yourself on the back for not having to sleep in the dirt but that's not a very high bar, is it? Some people want to have purpose and to keep gro…

I've seen your username before on CSCQ. Tell me - is there any hope for people like me? Any way that I can come even close to matching your total compensation anytime soon (Which I'm assuming is around $350kish)?

Re: What the interns have wrought, 2020 edition

#219

Post by BlueTemplar »

rtlfe wrote: post #32
fractionalhare wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Routinely" is doing a lot of heavy lifting. I can confirm it's possible, as I've been in the industry and have spoken to people who make seven figures at Jane Street. But I would rather say it's "reasonably attainable" for an engineer who has been there for at least five - seven years and is really hitting their stride with the type of work. They do routinely beat out top tech compensation, and most engineers there…

> Either you're good enough to maintain at least that level of comp, and you stay, or you're out within a year or two. Tech companies have explicit up-or-out policies for lower-level engineers. I don't think the top trading firms do any more firing of new grads than FANG does.

Uh, that would mean that most engineers end up without a job - surely this is not the case ?
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