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Understanding Jane Street

thediff.co

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Re: Understanding Jane Street

#101

Post by data_maan »

j7ake wrote: post #89
uniqueuid wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That sounds as if you can jump into a field without spending 10-20 years of learning and do cutting-edge research. I'm not sure whether someone who has done quant finance can make meaningful contributions to the actual science. So if your role ends up spending money and doing top-level management, why not just fund companies that do and stay in finance? [edit] To add one prominent example - it's doable, as Jeff Hawki…

You’re overestimating the technical skills needed to do cancer research: there’s a reason why many wet labs allow high school students to come and help with research. It’s mostly grunt work and whatever technical skills can be learned by a high school student over a summer. I would venture to say the average Jane street worker has done more good for society than the average cancer researcher or Alzheimer’s researcher…

What good has Jane Street done to a person living in Madagascar?

This is just blatant Jane Street (and more generally, hedge fund) propaganda.

Yes, you serve some role within the financial system, but you're not really relevant to society imminently and to non-western societies generally.

Re: Understanding Jane Street

#102

Post by data_maan »

uniqueuid wrote: post #82
j7ake wrote: post #77

Regarding the last point in working at Jane Street versus research on fusion/cancer: You could maximise more good by first working at Jane Street in your 20s, retire by 30, and then set up your own smal fusion/cancer research lab where you can do research without being tied to government funding and politics. By 30, many cancer researchers have barely finished their PhDs, so you won’t actually be that far behind scie…

That sounds as if you can jump into a field without spending 10-20 years of learning and do cutting-edge research. I'm not sure whether someone who has done quant finance can make meaningful contributions to the actual science. So if your role ends up spending money and doing top-level management, why not just fund companies that do and stay in finance? [edit] To add one prominent example - it's doable, as Jeff Hawki…

I think Hawkin's work (including things done at Numenta, his company) is highly controversial in neuroscience. I have read some of the articles and claims and the biggest issues is that he produces a lot of vision papers, that contain no actionable models and thus ultimately are useless.

So either he's withholding whatever concrete insight he found, or he hasn't found it yet - I believe the latter is more likely.

Re: Understanding Jane Street

#103

Post by ChadNauseam »

data_maan wrote: post #101
j7ake wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re overestimating the technical skills needed to do cancer research: there’s a reason why many wet labs allow high school students to come and help with research. It’s mostly grunt work and whatever technical skills can be learned by a high school student over a summer. I would venture to say the average Jane street worker has done more good for society than the average cancer researcher or Alzheimer’s researcher…

What good has Jane Street done to a person living in Madagascar? This is just blatant Jane Street (and more generally, hedge fund) propaganda. Yes, you serve some role within the financial system, but you're not really relevant to society imminently and to non-western societies generally.

What good has cancer research done to a person living in Madagascar?

Re: Understanding Jane Street

#104

Post by nly »

paulpauper wrote: post #76
benreesman wrote: post #60

I find this stuff fascinating, and this article is way above average for online posts about proprietary/algorithmic/quantitative/low-latency trading (very leaky Venn diagram there). I have a few nitpicks but overall it's informative and it's an interesting format: viewing an industry through the lens of a particular firm, especially one as fascinating as Jane. Anything that develops literacy in modern finance amongst…

I hope the author(s) do Medallion next. Medallion has probably gotten more scrutiny than any other fund, yet 3 decades later it's still as opaque as ever beyond vague 'statistical methods'. It makes a lot of money no matter what. It's more tight-lipped and exclusive than Jane Street. I don't even think anyone knows even if it's doing market making or not. Or if it's making short-term directional bets. You would think…

It's probably pretty easy to keep the returns on a pot as small as $10bn sweet if you just reserve all your best alphas for that fund. There are proprietary trading firms trading pots that size for a single shareholder.

What I've been told is that Rentech also effectively use their public funds as a source of revenue to juice development of proprietary platform, so some of it is business cunning rather than a hard technical edge.

They were also got on the quant train very early.

Re: Understanding Jane Street

#105

Post by data_maan »

Donckele wrote: post #99
j7ake wrote: post #77

Regarding the last point in working at Jane Street versus research on fusion/cancer: You could maximise more good by first working at Jane Street in your 20s, retire by 30, and then set up your own smal fusion/cancer research lab where you can do research without being tied to government funding and politics. By 30, many cancer researchers have barely finished their PhDs, so you won’t actually be that far behind scie…

The article should not have delved into this as its a can of worms - stick with the industry, programming and math. Its funny that the article uses a “chess champion” and a “concert pianist” as examples to to argue that you don’t question their occupations when it comes to being a benefit to mankind or not. I mean, the huge fucking salaries, where does the money come from? from fucking trees? WTF! Seriously? I predic…

For some reason articles on hedge funds bragging about intellectual abilities if their employees always seem to invoke these professions (chess champion, concert pianist).

I'm still waiting to see them bragging about having top proctologists in their team ;)

Re: Understanding Jane Street

#106

Post by TrackerFF »

j7ake wrote: post #89
uniqueuid wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That sounds as if you can jump into a field without spending 10-20 years of learning and do cutting-edge research. I'm not sure whether someone who has done quant finance can make meaningful contributions to the actual science. So if your role ends up spending money and doing top-level management, why not just fund companies that do and stay in finance? [edit] To add one prominent example - it's doable, as Jeff Hawki…

You’re overestimating the technical skills needed to do cancer research: there’s a reason why many wet labs allow high school students to come and help with research. It’s mostly grunt work and whatever technical skills can be learned by a high school student over a summer. I would venture to say the average Jane street worker has done more good for society than the average cancer researcher or Alzheimer’s researcher…

> I would venture to say the average Jane street worker has done more good for society than the average cancer researcher or Alzheimer’s researcher.

Might be one of the more arrogant things I've read. And I frequent WallStreetOasis.

Re: Understanding Jane Street

#107

Post by dannyw »

pigtailgirl wrote: post #98

-- only managed to make it half way through the article so apologies if this was covered later - re: the intern game - if the game is confidence in the probability of your answers - couldn't you deliberately get the answers wrong and just bet low confidence in your answers? - this seems like a really stupid comment on my part so I presume I'm missing something important --

No context around Jane Street, but I'd expect the goal to still be maximising your return / value. The people who are better at assessing probability and risk will have a higher value in aggregate.

Filter out those who made bets too big to avoid outliers.

Re: Understanding Jane Street

#108

Post by data_maan »

benreesman wrote: post #60

I find this stuff fascinating, and this article is way above average for online posts about proprietary/algorithmic/quantitative/low-latency trading (very leaky Venn diagram there). I have a few nitpicks but overall it's informative and it's an interesting format: viewing an industry through the lens of a particular firm, especially one as fascinating as Jane. Anything that develops literacy in modern finance amongst…

I find the article to be a poorly written piece of propaganda for Jane Street as you could change "Jane Street" for "Citadel" for example and entire paragraphs would still be true.

> it's an interesting format: viewing an industry through the lens of a particular firm

What's interesting about that? Almost every other article does that.

Re: Understanding Jane Street

#109

Post by Krastan »

pigtailgirl wrote: post #98

-- only managed to make it half way through the article so apologies if this was covered later - re: the intern game - if the game is confidence in the probability of your answers - couldn't you deliberately get the answers wrong and just bet low confidence in your answers? - this seems like a really stupid comment on my part so I presume I'm missing something important --

You only get more tokens when you're right. So to "win" you have to bet high when you know you'll be right, so you get the most tokens, and bet low when you're not sure so you don't lose too many. Getting it wrong only loses you tokens.

Re: Understanding Jane Street

#110

Post by data_maan »

ChadNauseam wrote: post #103
data_maan wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What good has Jane Street done to a person living in Madagascar? This is just blatant Jane Street (and more generally, hedge fund) propaganda. Yes, you serve some role within the financial system, but you're not really relevant to society imminently and to non-western societies generally.

What good has cancer research done to a person living in Madagascar?

So you've established: People in Madagascar don't get cancer.
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