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What the interns have wrought, 2025

blog.janestreet.com

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Re: What the interns have wrought, 2025

#31

Post by smokel »

MontyCarloHall wrote: post #26
KHRZ wrote: post #2

I was curious what kind of company needed to develop all these different kinds of advanced tech. Turns out it's just so they can be sneaky and trade shares quickly. Kind of sad IMO.

Agreed. Amongst the top 5% smartest quantitatively-minded kids I knew in college, I’d say ~25% of them ended up at quant shops like Jane Street, sometimes straight out of school, sometimes after doing a PhD. I can only imagine what good that brainpower could do for humanity if it weren’t occupied finding cleverer ways to manipulate electronic money.

They could spend their time playing chess, solving Fermat's last theorem, or invent space weapons. And why stop at humanity?

Re: What the interns have wrought, 2025

#32

Post by infecto »

whitexn--g28h wrote: post #30
infecto wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At the end of the day they are a prop firm. They are a business trying to make money and part of that is market making but it’s not solely market making. You may not like it but we function in a capitalist society and as such the efficiency of markets is part of that. To have that happen usually requires the market as a whole participating and that includes firms like Jane Street. In the India case I don’t know if wh…

The majority of counterparties were regular citizens, who did not understand that what Jane Street was doing was even possible. Money is debt, you can’t make it without someone else owing it. Taking billions in profits from India’s stock market is pretty straightforward, millions of Indians lost their savings.

You’re not entirely wrong. India does have a problem with gambling and especially in Bank Nifty. I think something like 50% of options volume is retail, which is wildly high. Just because there is a gambling problem does not make it “pretty straightforward”. The courts will hopefully figure it out to their local pleasing.

Edit: I don’t think my point was clear. If you are going to allow retail in the options market, you should also be ok with sophisticated actors participating in it.

Re: What the interns have wrought, 2025

#33

Post by Cthulhu_ »

MontyCarloHall wrote: post #26
KHRZ wrote: post #2

I was curious what kind of company needed to develop all these different kinds of advanced tech. Turns out it's just so they can be sneaky and trade shares quickly. Kind of sad IMO.

Agreed. Amongst the top 5% smartest quantitatively-minded kids I knew in college, I’d say ~25% of them ended up at quant shops like Jane Street, sometimes straight out of school, sometimes after doing a PhD. I can only imagine what good that brainpower could do for humanity if it weren’t occupied finding cleverer ways to manipulate electronic money.

Thing is, there's very few problems that don't involve money or making money that can be solved with software. Even laudable projects like green energy are ultimately capitalist endeavours, since nobody will build solar panels etc for free.

Re: What the interns have wrought, 2025

#34

Post by PartiallyTyped »

PartiallyTyped wrote: post #27
KHRZ wrote: post #2

I was curious what kind of company needed to develop all these different kinds of advanced tech. Turns out it's just so they can be sneaky and trade shares quickly. Kind of sad IMO.

Reality is far more sad. Companies like JaneStreet, 2Sigma, etc employ some of the best software engineers, mathematicians, physicists and what not just so they can - have better weather forecasts to identify whether a 1 degree delta in South CA can increase oil costs cents on the barrel, - run pandemic simulations to identify how the spread might happen and where inflation will rise so they move faster, - track occu…

Exercise for the reader; stay a while, and listen.

Once you start noticing things changing, try to identify how you could profit off of it. If it's a change, then there's profit to be made somehow.

Any anecdote is a potential lead.

Re: What the interns have wrought, 2025

#35

Post by infecto »

jt2190 wrote: post #21
plst wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can someone who actually understands the topic explain to me (or link good resources) why/if what they do is useful to anyone? Or are they literally just in the business of making money? (anyone except themselves of course. I'm serious, any hints of irony are unintended)

> Or are they literally just in the business of making money? All for-profit businesses can be viewed abstractly as “in the business of making money”, so this doesn’t really distinguish Jane Street in any way. > … why/if what they do is useful to anyone? The utility that Jane Street provides is to the be a persistent buyer and seller of equities. Basically you can call them at any time and buy shares or sell shares.…

I do like this take and one of the reasons I don’t like how many folks pile in on the same theme “these folks are wasting their lives”. We could make the same reductionist conclusion for probably most of the people here on HN.

Re: What the interns have wrought, 2025

#36

Post by stuartjohnson12 »

redwood wrote: post #13
hackrmn wrote: post #3

I've not heard of Jane Street, but looking at the site, it seems they're quite the tech-savvy group for an _asset trading_ company. And reading the article, they apparently "trade" (pun intended) in quite a few different things from CSS to OCaml, which is really nice to see for a place that doesn't directly deal with software as their [business] product (or did I misunderstand their market?).

The Economist's take https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2025/06/26/j...

https://archive.ph/6Pn0K

Re: What the interns have wrought, 2025

#37

Post by infecto »

PartiallyTyped wrote: post #27
KHRZ wrote: post #2

I was curious what kind of company needed to develop all these different kinds of advanced tech. Turns out it's just so they can be sneaky and trade shares quickly. Kind of sad IMO.

Reality is far more sad. Companies like JaneStreet, 2Sigma, etc employ some of the best software engineers, mathematicians, physicists and what not just so they can - have better weather forecasts to identify whether a 1 degree delta in South CA can increase oil costs cents on the barrel, - run pandemic simulations to identify how the spread might happen and where inflation will rise so they move faster, - track occu…

Could we not make the same statement for most of the jobs people work here on HN?

Re: What the interns have wrought, 2025

#38

Post by infecto »

blitzar wrote: post #22
KHRZ wrote: post #2

I was curious what kind of company needed to develop all these different kinds of advanced tech. Turns out it's just so they can be sneaky and trade shares quickly. Kind of sad IMO.

People in glass houses shouldnt throw stones. Tech is more parastic.

While a little harsh I don’t entirely disagree. Depending on your lens, very few of us here on HN are doing something valuable for society.
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