Takeaways from the Jane Street bond prospectus • Hacker News Board

Re: Takeaways from the Jane Street bond prospectus

#221

Post by subsubzero » Thu, May 02, 2024, 3:49 PM UTC

mayguo wrote: post #63

SkipperCat wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SWE will probably make between 250-500k. Quants who can come up with profitable trading strategies can make a lot more. Managers of trading teams can make over 1MM and sometime a lot over 1MM depending on how profitable their teams perform. SWE who have deep subject matter experience are super valuable to these firms. Folks who understand how to write low latency code, FPGA work and other stuff like that. But the rea…

> SWE will probably make between 250-500k. New grad SWE is 400K https://www.levels.fyi/companies/jane-street/salaries/softwa... And levels.fyi not very accurate because 2nd year bonus is much larger than 1st year bonus in offer letter. Quants/traders can hit $1M with 5 YOE not too difficult. Portfolio managers (similar to EM in tech) definitely $1M, sometimes $10M.

That is quite good and comparable to IB(investment banker) salaries. Meaning a few years ago $200k by 22, and incrementing $100k a year with $1M by age 30, and $10M by age 40 or so. The starting salaries out of college are now about $350k. My question is I wonder if the upward salary trajectory is similar to that IB track, this is assuming the employee has a somewhat upward career trajectory; does Jane street cap out folks at a certain level?

Re: Takeaways from the Jane Street bond prospectus

#222

Post by unstruktured » Thu, May 02, 2024, 3:51 PM UTC

drgiggles wrote: post #148

I work in quantitative finance and have wanted to to start using OCaml at work for years. I just find that unless you are at a shop like Jane Street with a well developed proprietary code base, internally developed tooling, etc, there just isn't the ecosystem available for me to be nearly as productive as I can be in other well accepted languages in the quant dev space...which is a bummer. It's been a little while si…

If you use Jane street's base, core, and async libraries, you already have most of the tooling you need.

Re: Takeaways from the Jane Street bond prospectus

#223

Post by pas » Thu, May 02, 2024, 3:51 PM UTC

zie wrote: post #213

pas wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

regular buyers/sellers can use limit orders, no?

speculators can then sell/buy to/from them and if they are doing it well, they make a profit. (and help narrow the spread.) sure, great, they even inject some liquidity. but why do we want a narrow spread? it only helps people who don't know which side of the trade they would rather be on, no?

Re: Takeaways from the Jane Street bond prospectus

#224

Post by jagger27 » Thu, May 02, 2024, 3:52 PM UTC

walthamstow wrote: post #187

darkwater wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hectolitres and hectograms are used fairly often (the latter, daily) in Italian, for example.

Hectolitre is 100 litres, not 100ml, but hectogram is 100g, not 100kg? Very confusing!

Well yeah, litres and grams are the base units. Just because 1ml is 1g of water doesn't change how SI prefixes work.

Re: Takeaways from the Jane Street bond prospectus

#225

Post by detourdog » Thu, May 02, 2024, 3:53 PM UTC

dkekenflxlf wrote: post #202

detourdog wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

hang out in bars around the office you want to work at.

THX actually, quite a good idea, regardless which sector!

More generally it doesn't have to be bars. Go to where the people are that you want to meet.

Re: Takeaways from the Jane Street bond prospectus

#226

Post by mgh95 » Thu, May 02, 2024, 3:54 PM UTC

hyperbovine wrote: post #220

tikhonj wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

This implies that open source tools that do more (i.e. serve more use cases, work with larger amounts of software) work better for the narrowly defined use of a single company, even one as large as Jane Street.

Re: Takeaways from the Jane Street bond prospectus

#227

Post by bradlys » Thu, May 02, 2024, 3:56 PM UTC

lotsofpulp wrote: post #192

sullyreed8 wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Some high level SWEs at Google are billionaires. The entire tech industry has fewer billionaires than quant finance. If you are ambitious, tech SWE is a bad deal.

The tech billionaires are far richer than quant finance billionaires. And I would bet that tech SWE has a far higher probability of launching you into $10M+ range than quant finance. I don’t know that a few more single digit billionaires (if that is even true) puts quant finance ahead of tech SWE in terms of potential rewards for the “ambitious”. Also, quality of life is far better for tech SWE.

Getting into quant finance is not very common. Getting into tech SWE - even FAANG - is much more common. There are way more people working as SWE in tech than as quants.

I've rarely met anyone who is a quant and doesn't have a PhD. That already narrows down the field quite a bit.

Re: Takeaways from the Jane Street bond prospectus

#228

Post by [deleted] » Thu, May 02, 2024, 3:59 PM UTC

andrew_eu wrote: post #86

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…

[deleted]

Re: Takeaways from the Jane Street bond prospectus

#229

Post by jagger27 » Thu, May 02, 2024, 4:01 PM UTC

ragebol wrote: post #128

lambdaxyzw wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's actually a good question. Why? We have nanometets, picometers, centimeters, decimeters, kilometers, why not megameters?

I wonder why too. Same for weights: why have a ton (1000/kilo kilograms) if you can have a megagram (which is the weight of 1 cubic meter of water at the right conditions) The only 'commonly' used unit of measure larger than a kilometer is a light year, at least that I can think of. Maybe a Astronomical Unit, but not 'common' I suppose.

I think in terms of things commonly measured on Earth we don't benefit much from the jump to megametres. The diameter of this planet is 12,742 km. Does it help much to say 12.7 megametres? Not really. Off planet the distances between objects are far beyond megametres. AU, parsec, and lightyears make much more sense.

Re: Takeaways from the Jane Street bond prospectus

#230

Post by Galanwe » Thu, May 02, 2024, 4:01 PM UTC

ur-whale wrote: post #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.

> 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").

These are flows, not ownership.

Also, taking Citadel as an example, a vast portion of these flows are not their own, but rather thirs parties offloading their flows to them, so they have the underlying best execution guarantee to provide.

An other way to look at it is that investors are moving away from traditional brokers to execute their flows, because these HFT firms have become so good. So instead, investors offload their flows to HFTs acting as DMM instead.