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Takeaways from the Jane Street bond prospectus

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211–220 of 343 posts

Re: Takeaways from the Jane Street bond prospectus

#211

> Jane Street is stupidly profitable — net trading revenues of $4.4bn in the first quarter, after a $10.5bn haul in 2023, and a profit margin north of 70 per cent — but it bears repeating. That is the fourth straight year of net trading revenues exceeding $10bn. Gross revenues came at a record $21.9bn in 2023, up 34 per cent from 2022. Yes, I suppose this is all something to get all starry-eyed over, Jane Street encr…

That sounds interesting. Are there easy sources for seeing what companies drive US equity market volume? My google-fu failed me but maybe I am missing something specific in the fintech industry that tracks that kind of thing . . .

Re: Takeaways from the Jane Street bond prospectus

#212

> Jane Street is stupidly profitable — net trading revenues of $4.4bn in the first quarter, after a $10.5bn haul in 2023, and a profit margin north of 70 per cent — but it bears repeating. That is the fourth straight year of net trading revenues exceeding $10bn. Gross revenues came at a record $21.9bn in 2023, up 34 per cent from 2022. Yes, I suppose this is all something to get all starry-eyed over, Jane Street encr…

They provide market liquidity. The chances that a seller and buyer come together at the exact same time across the 7.5 hours of open market operations is fairly low, so they buy from sellers and sell to buyers and hold in between to keep the markets liquid. This liquidity costs(often advertised as the bid/ask spread).

We could essentially close them down if we moved all trading to say 1 hour a day.

Though most retail traders are upset they can only trade 7.5hrs a day, they want to trade 24/7 instead. They seem to WANT the liquidity and are apparently willing to pay for it.

Me, I'm fine with trading for only an hour a day, but I get not everyone is as lackadaisical as me.

Unless you have a better mouse trap to solve the liquidity problem, this is the best we have for now.

Re: Takeaways from the Jane Street bond prospectus

#213
post #209

> Jane Street is stupidly profitable — net trading revenues of $4.4bn in the first quarter, after a $10.5bn haul in 2023, and a profit margin north of 70 per cent — but it bears repeating. That is the fourth straight year of net trading revenues exceeding $10bn. Gross revenues came at a record $21.9bn in 2023, up 34 per cent from 2022. Yes, I suppose this is all something to get all starry-eyed over, Jane Street encr…

> I see people's hard earned money being siphoned by enormous financially-engineered vacuums, never to be seen again. can you expand on this? I have zero idea of what Jane street actually does and how they actually make money. (someone wrote that they have ~450 traders. trading what? equity? stocks? dark pools? PE? are they market makers? are they offering services to institution types?) also what does "people's hard…

They provide market liquidity. The chances that a seller and buyer come together at the exact same time across the 7.5 hours of open market operations is fairly low, so they buy from sellers and sell to buyers and hold in between to keep the markets liquid. This liquidity costs(often advertised as the bid/ask spread).

We could essentially close them down if we moved all trading to say 1 hour a day.

Re: Takeaways from the Jane Street bond prospectus

#214
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I want us to start using megameters. And gigameters. And instead of (metric) tons, I want megagrams. No kilotons; gigagrams.

I’m personally partial to attolightyears (about 1cm).

Surely you'd use the base unit of time, the second (lightseconds)?

atto-lightyear = 1e-18 lightyear

lightyear = 3.156e+7 lightsecond

Hence, atto-lightyear = 3.156e-11 lightsecond = 31.56 pico-lightsecond

Re: Takeaways from the Jane Street bond prospectus

#215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any tips for getting a first quant job ? Is learning C++ a must?

When we hire a junior person we are interested in math background, ability to communicate real world value of various models to our investment process and familiarity with computer science and software engineering concepts more than we care about experience with specific languages or technologies. That being said, C++ does still dominate this space so having exposure to it certainly would not hurt.

Does Fintech experience matter at all. I'm still in the finance space, but I'm very much just an average software engineer.

I've been meaning to learn C++, but I always find it intimidating.

Re: Takeaways from the Jane Street bond prospectus

#217

> Jane Street is stupidly profitable — net trading revenues of $4.4bn in the first quarter, after a $10.5bn haul in 2023, and a profit margin north of 70 per cent — but it bears repeating. That is the fourth straight year of net trading revenues exceeding $10bn. Gross revenues came at a record $21.9bn in 2023, up 34 per cent from 2022. Yes, I suppose this is all something to get all starry-eyed over, Jane Street encr…

That sounds interesting. Are there easy sources for seeing what companies drive US equity market volume? My google-fu failed me but maybe I am missing something specific in the fintech industry that tracks that kind of thing . . .

> Are there easy sources for seeing what companies drive US equity market volume?

No. Flow data is quite expensive, and most providers will only provide bucketed data unless you contribute with your own flows.

OP obviously has no idea what he's talking about but hey, what wouldnt you do for some internet points.

Re: Takeaways from the Jane Street bond prospectus

#218

I often discuss Jane Street as a great model of employee branding. They do well placed adverts/sponsorships (e.g. Standup Maths[0]), they produce a quite decent quality podcast (Signals and Threads [1]), and they have consistent monthly puzzles [2]. That level of investment in branding only makes sense, I think, at a large size. I'm kind of surprised they only have ~2500 people. [0] https://www.youtube.com/user/stand…

Jane Street has been doing this since they were much smaller. I interned there when they had like 300 people, and they were actively cultivating a great brand as an employer back then too—and looks like they've really made it work over the last decade! My impression with them in general was that they were willing to do lots of things that did not "conventionally" make sense at their size, and those things paid off. T…

I often dread when I see an employer using in-house systems for common tasks like project tracking and code review. I'm curious how does JS's internal tools stack up against systems out there, like Github or Jira.

Re: Takeaways from the Jane Street bond prospectus

#219
> it accounted for 10.4 per cent of all North American equity trading in 2023

Which means they're rapidly coming to a position which will easily allow them to game the system (what used to be known as "cornering the market").

I even wonder if their system has already learned cornering by itself via stochastic gradient descent.

Re: Takeaways from the Jane Street bond prospectus

#220

I often discuss Jane Street as a great model of employee branding. They do well placed adverts/sponsorships (e.g. Standup Maths[0]), they produce a quite decent quality podcast (Signals and Threads [1]), and they have consistent monthly puzzles [2]. That level of investment in branding only makes sense, I think, at a large size. I'm kind of surprised they only have ~2500 people. [0] https://www.youtube.com/user/stand…

Jane Street has been doing this since they were much smaller. I interned there when they had like 300 people, and they were actively cultivating a great brand as an employer back then too—and looks like they've really made it work over the last decade! My impression with them in general was that they were willing to do lots of things that did not "conventionally" make sense at their size, and those things paid off. T…

> Most people would see this as wasteful NIH

Because it is. What is the point of reinventing these wheels when gazillions of man hours have already been invested on open source tools that can do it better and cheaper?

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