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What the interns have wrought, 2025

blog.janestreet.com

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Re: What the interns have wrought, 2025

#41

Post by dude250711 »

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.

> I can only imagine what good that brainpower could do for humanity if it weren’t occupied finding cleverer ways to manipulate electronic money.

Maybe humanity can start paying them decent money first?

Re: What the interns have wrought, 2025

#42

Post by smokel »

infecto wrote: post #23
monospacegames wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that why they got banned in India recently? Because they were too good at offering complex financial instruments to customers at competitive prices? Ultimately companies like Jane Street have no moral rudder and it is a waste of talent for smart young people to work for them, but we are so far beyond such considerations at this point that it sounds naive to even suggest that maybe talented people should work on th…

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…

It would be nice if smart people would not require law to operate in an ethical way. For complicated problems, and for people who are just plain stupid, it's nice to have law and law enforcement, so that capitalist society can work properly.

But the idea that smart people should "push the boundaries" to find out "what is ok and what is not" is either naive or borderline sociopathic IMNSHO.

Re: What the interns have wrought, 2025

#43

Post by nemomarx »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #33
MontyCarloHall wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah but building stuff to sell is fairly different from making trades faster or other market stuff?

It's another level detached from real value

Re: What the interns have wrought, 2025

#44

Post by wyager »

monospacegames wrote: post #15
doovd wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a common rhetoric from someone who has no clue about financial markets (the person you replied to). Suppose you want to invest in S&p500 so you want to buy the ETF. Someone like Jane Street can create sell you this ETF, and take care of the risk that comes along with it. For example, the price they sell you this ETF should take into account the pricing of underlying stocks. While it sounds trivial, doing this pr…

Is that why they got banned in India recently? Because they were too good at offering complex financial instruments to customers at competitive prices? Ultimately companies like Jane Street have no moral rudder and it is a waste of talent for smart young people to work for them, but we are so far beyond such considerations at this point that it sounds naive to even suggest that maybe talented people should work on th…

Most likely they got slapped in india because a domestic market maker bribed the right regulators and JS did not

Re: What the interns have wrought, 2025

#45

Post by achierius »

dude250711 wrote: post #41
MontyCarloHall wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> I can only imagine what good that brainpower could do for humanity if it weren’t occupied finding cleverer ways to manipulate electronic money. Maybe humanity can start paying them decent money first?

You're right, we should fix our economic system so that it better incentivizes things we care about rather than stuff like quant research.

Re: What the interns have wrought, 2025

#46

Post by _Algernon_ »

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.

Plenty people of here work doing basically the same to maximize the amount of time people, including children and teens, spend staring at rectangular lights to show them ads.

Some amount of extremely competent engineers worked on the tech that made it possible to target beauty ads to insecure teen girls when they deleted a selfie.

Some amount of extremely competent engineers where complicit in building the tech that stoked the fire under the Rohingya genocide.

I could go on, but I think you get the point.

Re: What the interns have wrought, 2025

#47

Post by achierius »

infecto wrote: post #35
jt2190 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Both ad tech and quant work are essentially involuted in that you're spending ever greater amounts of effort and manpower to squeeze out marginal gains because of how much profit doing so provides. Society would not significantly notice or suffer if we spent half as much time on things like this. There are much bigger things we need to do.

Re: What the interns have wrought, 2025

#48

Post by achierius »

infecto wrote: post #37
PartiallyTyped wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Anyone who works in ad tech, sure.

But plenty of people here do work on real products. Planes need software, browsers need security patches, hell even your accounting app is good value over the days of doing that all by hand.

Re: What the interns have wrought, 2025

#49

Post by wyager »

plst wrote: post #7
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.

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)

I used to work there, so with the appropriate deference to that Upton Sinclair quote about paychecks:

Market makers like JS vastly increase market liquidity across all sectors, which is required for modern high-efficiency economies to work. McDonalds prices are possible because there's enough liquidity in corn futures.

More abstractly, high market liquidity corresponds to higher-confidence information about the future, which hedge funds generate (and distribute for a low fee via markets), allowing for more impressive planning ahead.

Also, you know how when you buy stocks it doesn't cost you anything and you often get better-than-public-book execution prices? That didn't happen prior to modern electronic market makers. Multiply that efficiency gain by umpteen trades every day.

In general, "being in the business of making money" inherently requires you to do something useful to get paid, to the extent you're not just abusing a principle agent problem or something. The most credible argument for hedge funds making money without doing something useful is that they're doing cantillon effect harvesting or something. I think that's pretty small overall.

Re: What the interns have wrought, 2025

#50

Post by infecto »

smokel wrote: post #42
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…

It would be nice if smart people would not require law to operate in an ethical way. For complicated problems, and for people who are just plain stupid, it's nice to have law and law enforcement, so that capitalist society can work properly. But the idea that smart people should "push the boundaries" to find out "what is ok and what is not" is either naive or borderline sociopathic IMNSHO.

I’m not being naive or sociopathic here, I’m pointing out how securities law actually functions, at least in the U.S. It’s rarely as cut-and-dry as you suggest. The courts exist precisely to resolve ambiguity, and there’s always some ebb and flow depending on the administration and the legal environment.

Before throwing around labels like “naive” or “sociopath,” it’s worth recognizing that a capitalist system relies on efficient markets, and efficient markets depend on laws being tested and clarified through the courts. That process benefits everyone.

I’m not making an ethical defense of any specific behavior. I’m saying that just because someone benefits from mispricing in a market doesn’t automatically make it unethical. The courts help define those boundaries. If you reject that premise and prefer a system without capitalism, then we’re simply talking past each other.

And for what it’s worth, tossing out loaded terms like “naive” or “sociopath” isn’t exactly an argument, it’s just lazy rhetoric. It’s ok for us to disagree but why use such a lazy argument?

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