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Understanding Jane Street

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Re: Understanding Jane Street

#251

Post by Hammershaft »

orange3xchicken wrote: post #7
bob29 wrote: post #3

Quoted post unavailable.

It sounds like you aren't really interested in a rational discussion by the second half of your post, but the typical arguments (incl in the post) for are that market makers reduce inefficiencies in the market & provide liquidity that significantly reduces the bar (i.e. make trading cheaper) for retail investors (like you or me) to trade. I think it is generally accepted that society does benefit from a modern and ef…

I think the equation changes when you weigh the marginal utility that market makers provide against the social opportunity cost of allocating intelligence to these firms.

Re: Understanding Jane Street

#252

Post by samatman »

Bluecobra wrote: post #232
ivanech wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

+1 to Trading at the Speed of Light. A great read, particularly for any engineer curious about clinging to the limits of physics. An example: microwave towers are used to beam data from Chicago to New York because it's faster than fiber optic cables. Even crazier: these microwave towers have their repeater hardware at the top of the tower (microwave towers usually have it at the bottom) so that they don't lose time i…

Even microwave is slow, they are using shortwave radio for certain signals. Maybe neutrinos are next? https://sniperinmahwah.wordpress.com/2018/05/07/shortwave-tr...

I'm not sure what's going on with this comment so let me make three observations:

The speed (latency) of the EM spectrum is the effective celerity of the medium: this doesn't differ in the air between microwave and shortwave in any meaningful way.

The speed (throughput) achievable on a given frequency is limited by the period of that frequence, high wavelengths can modulate more signal. Microwaves are higher frequency than radio by definition, so they have a higher throughput.

Neutrinos don't exceed the speed of light, and make a very bad medium of transmission given the near-complete lack of interaction with baryonic matter.

Re: Understanding Jane Street

#253

Post by greatpostman »

baby wrote: post #248
mabbo wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> People who are driven and smart don't suddenly earn their first $5m go off and buy an annuity I guess I must not be driven, because I would. Or at least something close enough to that. $5m just earning interest at 5%ish is way more income than I need to live the lifestyle I want. I'd buy a few acres in the middle of no where, build a nice house, grow a big garden, raise my daughter as a nice family man and never wo…

The thing is, if you end up in a job that pays this well it’s because you’re either very lucky (and congrats to you) or you’re very passionate. If you’re in the latter category why would you retire when you’re being paid to do what you love?

This isn’t true. It’s most likely because you went to an Ivy League school

Re: Understanding Jane Street

#254

Post by _fat_santa »

benreesman wrote: post #153
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…

I think the author meant "could retire very comfortably in their 30s", and you're correct to point out that's not what it literally says. But as for "could"? Shit you can do that at Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta if you're in that league and start out of undergrad. In my experience (more than a few of my FAANG-era colleagues either came from or went to high-technology finance), people don't actually leave Google to…

> I think people go to high-technology finance because they want to test themselves against a harder class of problem in a more adversarial setting against people who feel the same.

That and among developers, I think Jane Street has hit "mythological status". I've known about Jane Street since I was an undergrad looking for internships and it was always talked about like: "oh yeah, that's where the REALLY smart people go to work". I think a little part of going to work there for everyone is figuratively one-upping your friends from college, you made to the place where geniuses worked.

Re: Understanding Jane Street

#255

Post by dejerpha »

samatman wrote: post #252
Bluecobra wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even microwave is slow, they are using shortwave radio for certain signals. Maybe neutrinos are next? https://sniperinmahwah.wordpress.com/2018/05/07/shortwave-tr...

I'm not sure what's going on with this comment so let me make three observations: The speed (latency) of the EM spectrum is the effective celerity of the medium: this doesn't differ in the air between microwave and shortwave in any meaningful way. The speed (throughput) achievable on a given frequency is limited by the period of that frequence, high wavelengths can modulate more signal. Microwaves are higher frequenc…

Neutrinos don’t need to go around the earth, so in theory you have a pi/2 advantage over an EM signal when sending to an antipodal location, for instance. In practice of course, throughput is utterly horrible for the reason you indicate.

Re: Understanding Jane Street

#256

Post by geodel »

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.

Well, that person can now learn Ocaml because Jane Street uses Ocaml.

Re: Understanding Jane Street

#257

Post by runevault »

bitcharmer wrote: post #244
steveBK123 wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Esoteric languages is often a good screener for good devs. A large talent pool isn't necessarily a positive if you don't spend a lot of effort on your recruiting (mostly filtering) process. It really just increases the risk of bad hires.

I'm struggling to understand how OCaml reduces the risk of bad hires and other languages don't.

Languages large swaths of the industry know (Java, C#, JS, Python, etc) include a subset of people who learned it purely for the job opportunities but aren't competent developers. The number of people who learn more niche languages like an ML or Haskell has a far lower % of people of that type.

An example of a language that I could see shifting from one to the other pretty soon is Rust now that it could be a way in to many of the high paying big companies like Google, Amazon, etc.

Re: Understanding Jane Street

#258

Post by llaolleh »

steveBK123 wrote: post #227
bitcharmer wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having worked in HFT for well over a decade now, I'd say OCaml is more of a deterrent than helps in getting access to larger pool of talent.

Esoteric languages is often a good screener for good devs. A large talent pool isn't necessarily a positive if you don't spend a lot of effort on your recruiting (mostly filtering) process. It really just increases the risk of bad hires.

This. If you want really good devs, they tend to play around with all sorts of things that don't necessarily have economical value. This includes esoteric programming languages.

Re: Understanding Jane Street

#259

Post by pushrax »

samatman wrote: post #252
Bluecobra wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even microwave is slow, they are using shortwave radio for certain signals. Maybe neutrinos are next? https://sniperinmahwah.wordpress.com/2018/05/07/shortwave-tr...

I'm not sure what's going on with this comment so let me make three observations: The speed (latency) of the EM spectrum is the effective celerity of the medium: this doesn't differ in the air between microwave and shortwave in any meaningful way. The speed (throughput) achievable on a given frequency is limited by the period of that frequence, high wavelengths can modulate more signal. Microwaves are higher frequenc…

Shortwave radio can be transmitted around the curve of Earth by ionospheric reflection and refraction so fewer repeaters are needed. This allows crossing vast oceans where microwave infrastructure might not be possible.

As you say the downside is available bandwidth and throughput.

Re: Understanding Jane Street

#260

Post by dash2 »

pvitz wrote: post #183
adament wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

I would also suggest to forget about Hull and Wilmott and would suggest to start with the excellent book by Shreve: "Stochastic Calculus for Finance. Volume II: Continuous Time Models". Then, you can quickly read Bjoerk, work through Brigo/Mercurio (if you like that style) or Andersen/Piterbarg. Alternatively, if you want to fully dive into into the subject after Shreve, Musiela/Rutkowski: "Martingale Methods in Fina…

I'd say that Shreve and Musiela lack rigour and are too focused on trivia, name-dropping and anecdotes. Jiao's "Infinite-dimensional methods in amassing vast bags of gold" is unsurpassed. For its coverage of Black-Scholes, I'd also recommend Schulz's "Good Grief, Charlie Brown". Sorry, everyone seemed to be doing this so I felt I should contribute too.
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