Takeaways from the Jane Street bond prospectus

As we have talked about in the other part of this thread, envy has absolutely nothing to do with it. Stop thinking it does. You are starting to sound like a broken record.

> It would be technically negative in every measurement possible.

Since you believe this so strongly, can you provide academic sources for this perspective?

> envy has absolutely nothing to do with it

Please do tell me then, what exactly motivates all the proposals for restricting trading periods or changing to auctions? All I have seen is that Jane Street and other make “too much money”. The reality is actually different they provide a service in 20 countries across all asset classes and do it for only $12B/year, that’s actually very cheap once the scope of their reach and operations are understood.

Please explain what is the motivation other than envy behind the numerous comments proposing some restrictions or claiming they aren’t worse or even better.

There are definitely academic sources that will backup my assertions however the irony is that my position somehow needs to be defended when it’s actually obvious to anyone who has spent a lifetime on the inside of the very system we are discussing and that somehow absurdist proposals about restricting market hours are accepted on face value without any rational or academic evidence whatsoever.

Corporate and government bonds have many venues and have for decades and in my opinion they are public in the sense that any qualifying participant can get access to them. Can an individual with a $10k in a 401k, no, but US treasury cash bonds have had published prints and quotes since 1970s. I personally remember corporates and converts prices and trades on my early Bloomberg terminal.

Now perhaps you call them private because they were and still mostly are for institutional traders however they are published prices and/or RFQ systems or there are continuously published two sided quotes. Yes big trades happened on phones and Jane Street is still involved in it.

When I think of a private market it means a market where prices and transactions are not published. So our terminology is different.

Fundamentally we disagree on the role of dealers and market makers. In my personal extensive market experience they are foundational and always have been. They carry inventory and manage risk. This has happened literally for 1000s of years and even in early NYSE and in the earlier stock markets in London and Amsterdam they were the key players in the price discovery process.

What you claim, that markets can even function with time restrictions and without two sided quoted dealers/makers in my world is absurd. I have nothing more to say. I don’t believe you have real world extensive market knowledge and if you do, you must he significantly younger than me. Goodnight.

What do you mean, "reinventing these wheels"? Are you sure there are other tools that look and feel the same?

Letting your development team control and build their own tools is a good idea, if they are able to. You probably don't want to do it in Java or C#, it'll take too much time, too many people, and be too unreliable.

NiH is expensive

> 1. You can do it better, with better taste

You can, or you can just work around the existing tooling, which is quicker and assuming you choose wisely, has a wealth of googleable documentation. Its humbling, because you need to learn through _using_ rather than creating. It feels less productive, even though you're 90% of the way there with an existing tool

> 3. Building something yourself lets you become an expert in the domain and the tool you're building,

It might do, or it also might just drown you in complexities of the domain that you're building the tool for. Plus the assumptions you make when first designing the tool tend to be disproven as you learn more. Its good to question tools, but not blindly re-write them without studying _why_ they do that thing in that weird way.

> 4. More often than people realize, building something yourself ends up simply faster than first learning

Which means you are very likely make the same elementary mistakes as the previous generation tools. Plus its _always_ slower to start. mainly because naive re-writes have naive bugs. But you just don;t know it yet.

At the legions of VFX companies I've worked at, the number of people who look at the asset management system and go "Oh thats not hard, lets just re-write that to be x" is too damn high. 6 engineers and a year later, they still have a broken system, but in new and interesting ways.

Am I saying that you _shouldn't_ make tooling/software or custom things? no. I'm saying that you should really save yourself for something that critical to the company.

All projects have a limited number of innovation tokens. The more you use the slower your project will go. You should really only look to use 2 innovation tokens max.