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Takeaways from the Jane Street bond prospectus

ft.com

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Re: Takeaways from the Jane Street bond prospectus

#161

Post by kqr »

bena wrote: post #125
CharlieDigital wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The second definition of "anarchy" according to Google: > the organization of society on the basis of voluntary cooperation, without political institutions or hierarchical government; anarchism. Sounds like a perfect fit.

Yeah, that doesn't exist. Any gathering of people are going to have political institutions whether they are codified or not. Similarly, there's going to be someone or some group of people who the others look to for direction. And whether or not it is codified, those people will form a layer of hierarchy for your "non" government. Because people seem to think it's "politics" and "government" that are the problem. It's…

> whether they are codified or not

Was it an intentional rhetorical device to brush past the important distinction?

Yes, there will always be more powerful cliques. This is Jo Freeman's The Tyranny of Structurelessness. But the point is specifically whether those cliques and hierarchies are encoded into formal committees or whether they remain fluid based on the desires of the group at any given moment.

If we avoid codifying the hierarchies, we get better distribution of information and resources, people are held responsible to those who delegated tasks to them, and responsibility can be rotated more freely.

Re: Takeaways from the Jane Street bond prospectus

#162

Post by hoosieree »

flipbrad wrote: post #35
belinder wrote: post #20

Why do they say 179,000 million instead of 179 billion? Is that common in their industry?

Billion has wildly different meanings. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billion

Prefer "zillion" or "kajillion" to avoid these sorts of pitfalls.

Re: Takeaways from the Jane Street bond prospectus

#163

Post by peeters »

justin66 wrote: post #51
flipbrad wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Billion has wildly different meanings. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billion

Who knew? But that article indicates America has used the short scale (base ten) forever and the UK has used it since 1974, so let's just assume that FT (an English language paper) is not worried about confusion regarding the meaning of 'billion' and there's a different norm at work here.

> the UK has used it since 1974, so let's just assume that FT (an English language paper) is not worried about confusion

Anyone aged around 60 or older would have been learning these numbers before 1974, and that's a significant overlap with FT's audience. You are dismissing this as if it's Middle English. It's an entirely reasonable explanation, at least one that shouldn't be dismissed.

Re: Takeaways from the Jane Street bond prospectus

#164

Post by acegopher »

fire_lake wrote: post #81
bogtog wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you telling me that one of American capitalism's peaks is basically a worker collective?

Capitalism is all about allowing many different organisational structures where the fitness function is profitability. Where it goes wrong is when the regulator fails to stop foul play…

It also went wrong using only profitability as the only measure. Obviously an unprofitable company isn't long-term sustainable, but a maximally profitable company might not be either, as a company exists within a society and on a planet with limited resources.

Re: Takeaways from the Jane Street bond prospectus

#165

Post by CharlieDigital »

hoosieree wrote: post #158
CharlieDigital wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but they could have been just as successful using another language. I remember reading about one founder that picked an obscure language because in doing so, it self-selected for more curious engineers who worked in the languages for fun rather than any other practical (re:job) reasons. His thesis is that finding one really good engineer in said language was 1 in 10 (10 interviews to find 1 really good engineer) wh…

Talented people are valuable in general which gives them bargaining power so they can demand to use their preferred tech regardless of whether that tech is niche or not . I generally agree with the notion that talented folks are more likely to explore niche tech. Just be careful making the leap from "they prefer niche X" to "therefore they are talented". Two anecdotes: 1. I'm an average programmer who likes niche tec…

    > Just be careful making the leap from "they prefer niche X" to "therefore they are talented".
Not my approach, to be sure :)

I think I have a pretty good heuristic for finding curious and inquisitive people that doesn't rely on esoteric tech stacks.

My sense is that a lot of engineering teams have lost their way so the only mechanism they can use now are convoluted leetcode style interviews instead to filter out Senior Java Dev Candidate 43 versus Senior Java Dev Candidate 96.

I write a little about this here: Your Interview Process is Too Damn Long (and How to Fix It) (https://chrlschn.dev/blog/2023/10/your-interview-process-is-...)

Re: Takeaways from the Jane Street bond prospectus

#166

Post by ilc »

tombert wrote: post #134
kettleballroll wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I come from a very small provincial university, but they still reached out to me 2018, so I don't think so. (I bombed their interview and didn't get an offer, though).

In 2016 I was still a dropout and they did an interview with me. I also bombed it. I have applied about a dozen times since then after getting my degree from WGU and they haven’t gotten back to me; I almost wonder if not putting any college experience on the resume was a blind spot for their filter.

Maybe quite the opposite. Wall Street and Finance is can be very aggressive and learn it for yourself.

I learned math of finance from a professor I'm pretty sure was quanting on the Street at the time.

When I told him one of the constants in our little trading game was off by a factor of 10x, he said prove it. My final talk was: "How to make 2.3 million dollars in 30 days using options."

The real lesson wasn't about pricing options. It was about being ruthless when the time came.

Re: Takeaways from the Jane Street bond prospectus

#167

Post by chii »

dchftcs wrote: post #151
ethbr1 wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It makes you wonder if there's a retirement-encouraged culture for inactive partners. Which is probably what you'd want in a high-performance firm, less everyone look at the absent top level extractors and it turn into a law firm.

Equity holders are probably forever, and the incentive problems are a hard thing to solve. But you won't be a founder or early joiner if you're not allowed to keep your equity anyway. Fortunately it doesn't take that much to get top talent, because so many other companies underpay. Jane Street only has to pay out a small fraction of their PnL and doesn't even need to have a non-compete.

with a profit margin at 70%, they can afford very high pay.

And the equity holders would get diluted a bit when new employees are offered equity, but looking at the rate of profitability, each new employee more than earn their share in equity, even at the high end. Therefore, it is in fact, in the existing equity holder's interest to get diluted a bit to hire these employees, who would produce way more value (and thus increase the total value) compared to the loss in dilution!

Re: Takeaways from the Jane Street bond prospectus

#168

Post by cess11 »

DrBazza wrote: post #59
anonyfox wrote: post #5

If I remember correctly they are also by far the biggest poster child for OCaml, right? Blub Paradox at play here?

Back in the 90s/00s the CSFB quant team went with F#. Immutable and functional is reasonable choice. Just not popular. These days, starting or running a financial business with less popular languages is, well, less popular.

F# came out in 2005, and was quite limited compared to the language it became from 2010 onwards.

Re: Takeaways from the Jane Street bond prospectus

#169

Post by justin66 »

Barrin92 wrote: post #84
justin66 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who knew? But that article indicates America has used the short scale (base ten) forever and the UK has used it since 1974, so let's just assume that FT (an English language paper) is not worried about confusion regarding the meaning of 'billion' and there's a different norm at work here.

>let's just assume that FT (an English language paper) is not worried about confusion The FT has a big international audience. As a German reader where a "Billion" is still 10^12 it does sometimes trip me up a little. So I at least find it useful.

That's a decent point, but what I don't get is, when I do a Google Translate from English to German for "billion," I get "Milliarde." Is the concern that German readers, reading the article in translation to German, will be confused? It would seem like the German readers reading the English article would understand.

Not trying to argue any point (I mean honestly...), just trying to understand the German POV here, which is interesting.

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