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Finding Signal in the Noise: Machine Learning and the Markets (Jane Street)

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11–20 of 157 posts

Re: Finding Signal in the Noise: Machine Learning and the Markets (Jane Street)

#11

I will eternally find it sad how much talent is wasted on trading. So much money, so much intelligence, so much time and effort, all the provide almost no tangible value to society.

Are you proposing a universal hierarchy of value where the goals individuals set for themselves are inherently worth less than the goals you want to set for them, if the goal they want for themselves is prosperity?

Who elected you Supreme Leader?

Re: Finding Signal in the Noise: Machine Learning and the Markets (Jane Street)

#12

I will eternally find it sad how much talent is wasted on trading. So much money, so much intelligence, so much time and effort, all the provide almost no tangible value to society.

Smart people who grew up poor making their own way, isn’t that the idea? Or do we just assume they’re all rich, privileged folks?

Re: Finding Signal in the Noise: Machine Learning and the Markets (Jane Street)

#13

I will eternally find it sad how much talent is wasted on trading. So much money, so much intelligence, so much time and effort, all the provide almost no tangible value to society.

If it didn’t provide value, nobody would pay for it.

The alternative to highly technical, agile quantitative trading is fat middle men, wide spreads, and capital sitting in 8%* stupider places than it would otherwise. That’s a pretty big deal even if the observable effects are extremely diffuse.

* Made up number, but if we woke up on Monday with nothing but the tech we used to trade in 1984 it would probably hit much worse.

Re: Finding Signal in the Noise: Machine Learning and the Markets (Jane Street)

#14

I will eternally find it sad how much talent is wasted on trading. So much money, so much intelligence, so much time and effort, all the provide almost no tangible value to society.

I agree, how dull and uninspired. I'm very much with Paul Graham, who believes in the creation of wealth (as opposed to the extraction of money).

Can you codify the difference? I seem to be fundamentally misunderstanding the difference between wealth creation and wealth extraction if voluntary market activity constitutes extraction.

I'd definitionally describe all voluntary transactions free of coercion to imply the buyer values the utility of what they're buying (i.e. true wealth - piles of currency are not true wealth, they're what you exchange for true wealth) more than the currency they're trading for it, no?

Involuntary transactions featuring coercion on the other hand, like the government demanding you pay taxes under threat of imprisonment (enforced at gunpoint, if necessary) are clearly extractive, by my definition.

Re: Finding Signal in the Noise: Machine Learning and the Markets (Jane Street)

#15

> In Young Cho thought she was going to be a doctor but fell into a trading internship at Jane Street Genuinely perplexing how they always try to show each multi-million earning engineer as some normal person and not someone that went to Exeter and Harvard

Graduating from a SUNY school, Jane Street gave me an interview and a fair shake. I didn't get the sense of elitism there. There does happen to be a lot of really smart engineers, mathematicians and scientists going to Harvard, MIT, etc.

There are places that without that Ivy League or Target School degree you don't hear back, I don't think Jane Street is one of them.

Re: Finding Signal in the Noise: Machine Learning and the Markets (Jane Street)

#16

I will eternally find it sad how much talent is wasted on trading. So much money, so much intelligence, so much time and effort, all the provide almost no tangible value to society.

Tyler Cowen did an 'ask me anything' at Jane Street when I interned in 2016. One of the interns asked him exactly this: "What do you think of the fact that we all work here instead of, I don't know, curing cancer?"

He replied with, roughly, "Those of you who work here probably couldn't do anything else other than perhaps math research. Arguably, working here is the economically efficient use of your time."

I think about whenever I see a comment like this. Quant firms select for a very specific set of skills. In particular, I've found that many traders/software engineers in quant are very smart but not very self-directed. Places like Jane Street work well for people who can excel, but only when given a lot of structure and direction. I think this is not unrelated to why so many people 'accidentally' end up as traders after going to an Ivy League school!

Re: Finding Signal in the Noise: Machine Learning and the Markets (Jane Street)

#17

I will eternally find it sad how much talent is wasted on trading. So much money, so much intelligence, so much time and effort, all the provide almost no tangible value to society.

At least it’s arguably better than working for giant ad engines.

Re: Finding Signal in the Noise: Machine Learning and the Markets (Jane Street)

#18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree, how dull and uninspired. I'm very much with Paul Graham, who believes in the creation of wealth (as opposed to the extraction of money).

Can you codify the difference? I seem to be fundamentally misunderstanding the difference between wealth creation and wealth extraction if voluntary market activity constitutes extraction. I'd definitionally describe all voluntary transactions free of coercion to imply the buyer values the utility of what they're buying (i.e. true wealth - piles of currency are not true wealth, they're what you exchange for true weal…

Money Extraction: fighting over a slice of pie.

Wealth Creation: creating new pie.

In practice, a lot of things that look extractive (e.g., designing better high frequency trading algorithms) potentially have some marginal utility (e.g., creating market liquidity), but the money high performing people make is likely larger than the utility they add to the system (because most of the money in having the best high frequency trading algorithm comes from beating other people's high frequency trading algorithms).

Re: Finding Signal in the Noise: Machine Learning and the Markets (Jane Street)

#19
post #9

I will eternally find it sad how much talent is wasted on trading. So much money, so much intelligence, so much time and effort, all the provide almost no tangible value to society.

I take the silver lining. Smart people getting rich is better than dumb people getting rich. Hopefully some day they'll do something good with that money.

The problem is that smart people are the ones being employed, not the ones getting rich.

Re: Finding Signal in the Noise: Machine Learning and the Markets (Jane Street)

#20
post #19
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I take the silver lining. Smart people getting rich is better than dumb people getting rich. Hopefully some day they'll do something good with that money.

The problem is that smart people are the ones being employed, not the ones getting rich.

I am pretty sure anyone who sticks around Jane Street for a while is getting “rich” by any popularly accepted measure.
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