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Understanding Jane Street

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Re: Understanding Jane Street

#141

Post by j7ake »

uniqueuid wrote: post #90
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…

But that's not the interesting part, right? That would be like saying that tech is simply assembling prototypes. The really interesting decisions are the strategic ones that require both a high-level overview of the opportunity landscape and some foundational knowledge of its feasibility. Or am I mistaken and it's simply brute force trials?

Yeah you’re right. My point is that the technical bar for entry is low, and can be attained maybe by spending one year in a top lab. You then skip the hazing ritual that is the PhD and postdoc and directly start your own small lab.

Spend your money attending conferences to make connections and get yourself updated in the field.

Hire technicians to help with your grunt work. Spend your days reading research papers, discussing science at conferences, and setting up new experiments.

Re: Understanding Jane Street

#142

Post by blitzar »

lordnacho wrote: post #120
melony wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since this is Hacker News, let's not beat about the bush. Here's a channel that actually go through derivatives pricing without hiding the math: https://youtube.com/c/QuantPy/videos

Whenever the topic comes up, I throw out a reference to Hull's Futures, Options and other derivatives, Wilmott's Quantitative Finance, and possibly also Taleb's Dynamic Hedging. That's more than enough on the instrument math side, most of what you'll see is pretty mundane stuff, unless you end up on an exotics structuring desk. I'd also note that JS and other MMs mostly don't do anything requiring you to know the int…

Hull's Futures, Options and other derivatives was on the bookshelf of a friend who worked at JS - it was their bible.

I always throught market microstructure was more important, but they insisted a disciplined application of the maths (as per the bible of Hull) was where the magic really was.

Re: Understanding Jane Street

#143

Post by badpun »

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?

What has a baker living down my street done for a person living in Madagascar?

Re: Understanding Jane Street

#144

Post by nly »

ithrow wrote: post #65
julianeon wrote: post #32

Something I don’t understand: Why haven’t their gains been arbitraged away? Conceptually what they do seems simple enough; and presumably you just need capital to do it. Hell, their own former employees could theoretically compete against them - as could many traders who would pay to learn those strategies. So why are they still making so much? I don’t understand why their “advantage” hasn’t been arbitrated away into…

If lone wolf day traders can make good money why can't they?

Over any sensible period of time, like a year, essentially all lone wolf day traders lose money

Re: Understanding Jane Street

#147

Post by adament »

blitzar wrote: post #142
lordnacho wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whenever the topic comes up, I throw out a reference to Hull's Futures, Options and other derivatives, Wilmott's Quantitative Finance, and possibly also Taleb's Dynamic Hedging. That's more than enough on the instrument math side, most of what you'll see is pretty mundane stuff, unless you end up on an exotics structuring desk. I'd also note that JS and other MMs mostly don't do anything requiring you to know the int…

Hull's Futures, Options and other derivatives was on the bookshelf of a friend who worked at JS - it was their bible. I always throught market microstructure was more important, but they insisted a disciplined application of the maths (as per the bible of Hull) was where the magic really was.

If you come from a pure math theory first background I would advise starting out with Björks “Arbitrage theory in continuous time”, I personally found the lack of rigor and superfluous examples in Hull frustrating and found Björk much more approachable then you can look into Hull for real life practicalities like daycount conventions, etc. If you want to go into complex derivatives pricing I would advise looking at the Andersen and Piterbarg trilogy.

Re: Understanding Jane Street

#148

Post by altdataseller »

SilverBirch wrote: post #137

>the winners get a job from which people routinely retire rich in their 30s, and the losers... don't Honestly, I find this ridiculous. Firstly, Yes, working at Jane Street is a well paying job and you'll do well out of it. No. People aren't routinely retiring in their 30s. I don't understand where this absurd idea comes from. Look at all the rich people in the world, look at how old they are, and ask, are they retire…

“ Look at all the rich people in the world, look at how old they are, and ask, are they retired? No! People who are driven and smart don't suddenly earn their first $5m go off and buy an annuity.”

No but having the freedom to start your own trading shop (or company) is hugely different than having to stick with a job you mostly don’t like to pay the bills

Re: Understanding Jane Street

#149

Post by pyb »

amelius wrote: post #136
pyb wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By now, finance and FAANG have minted a very large number of tech millionaires. So, in practice, you have you ask yourself why ~nobody has actually done what you say. Personally I don't think it's because of a lack of funds.

Bill Gates?

We were talking about retiring at 30 to do science, not retiring at 50 to fund science

Re: Understanding Jane Street

#150

Post by anfelor »

mgaunard wrote: post #111

Quite a few inaccuracies in there. The ones that jump at me: - OCaml does type inference, so you don't actually declare the types and have the compiler check them, as stated in the article. - Investors are not market-makers, the two words actually refer to the two types of opposed participants in the market. - OCaml is the language used for research, but they actually have a lot of developers working on the compiler…

Some counter-points:

In Ocaml-world it is customary to write .mli files that specify the types of exported functions and modules. Those are then checked by the compiler against the .ml file with the implementation. In the .ml file you indeed use type inference over annotations almost all of the time.

The Ocaml compiler is largely written in Ocaml. C and C++ are not used very much at Jane Street as far as I know.

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