from Hacker News

Takeaways from the Jane Street bond prospectus

by henrik_w on 5/1/24, 8:05 AM with 330 comments

  • by andrew_eu on 5/2/24, 12:49 PM

    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/standupmaths [1] https://signalsandthreads.com/ [2] https://www.janestreet.com/puzzles/current-puzzle/

  • by jddj on 5/2/24, 2:23 PM

    Some idle trivia, in the London office the d in the illuminated "Food Bar" sign above the cafeteria has been switched off.

  • by drgiggles on 5/2/24, 1:47 PM

    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 since the last time I investigated this though.

  • by Smaug123 on 5/2/24, 11:47 AM

    > At the end of 2023, Jane Street employed 2631 people

    > About 80 per cent of the company's capital comes from employee equity, which has swelled to $21.3bn at the end of 2023

    o.O

  • by klelatti on 5/2/24, 1:24 PM

    Great comment from the FT's comments section on this piece.

    > A good mate who runs and wrecks expensive cars for hobby once reminded me that course plotting (i.e. research) and braking (i.e. risk management) are the two sine qua non contributors to a successful race.

    Along with a reminder that disasters happen when businesses forget this (Boeing!)

  • by keyle on 5/2/24, 11:46 AM

    I love them because they keep the OCaml dream alive, but any company shouldn't have this kind of reach, especially in the realm of automation. This probably won't end well...

    Meanwhile I'd love to know what their edge is... It's probably more than OCaml, although... ;)

  • by sgt on 5/2/24, 12:13 PM

    Whenever OCaml stories popped up about Jane Street, I always figured they were about 30-40 employees by now. 2613 people?!

  • by anonyfox on 5/2/24, 11:32 AM

    If I remember correctly they are also by far the biggest poster child for OCaml, right? Blub Paradox at play here?

  • by jedberg on 5/2/24, 3:11 PM

    Interesting, yesterday there was a thread on reddit in /r/ExperiencedDevs asking "What place is known as the ones with the best engineers now? One where if you saw that place on their resume you'd automatically assume they were good?"

    And one of the answers was Jane St. Apparently they produce great engineers.

  • by udev4096 on 5/2/24, 11:32 AM

  • by carlsborg on 5/2/24, 1:25 PM

    This company extracted ~$22 Billion in gross trading revenue from markets with quantitative trading strategies last year.

  • by padjo on 5/2/24, 11:37 AM

    SBF got his start there right?

  • by EMM_386 on 5/2/24, 3:22 PM

    > Jane Street is stupidly profitable — net trading revenues of $4.4bn in the first quarter, after a $10.5bn haul in 2023, and a profit margin north of 70 per cent — but it bears repeating. That is the fourth straight year of net trading revenues exceeding $10bn. Gross revenues came at a record $21.9bn in 2023, up 34 per cent from 2022.

    Yes, I suppose this is all something to get all starry-eyed over, Jane Street encroaching on Citadel Securities, the two of whom control 30% of the US equity market volume.

    I see it another way. I see people's hard earned money being siphoned by enormous financially-engineered vacuums, never to be seen again. And not just in the US, globally. This won't stop at 30% of the US equity market. It won't stop until the music stops and the last chair breaks. Which may or may not be soon. It will certainly be coming at some point.

    Five times the London Stock Exchange’s entire trading volumes in 2023 in just your ETF arm? Sure ... this sounds like reasonable growth ...

    > This is why some people argue that APs like Jane Street have become systemically important.

    Oh, you don't say!

    > About 80 per cent of the company’s capital comes from employee equity

    That's adorable. They're like a little mom-and-pop shop ... except not anything like that.

  • by ur-whale on 5/2/24, 3:45 PM

    > 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.

  • by neonate on 5/2/24, 3:41 PM

  • by djaouen on 5/2/24, 2:29 PM

    I have to give it to them, choosing OCaml was excellent bait. Gives them an aura of intelligence while they milk Wall Street dry ;)

  • by taneq on 5/2/24, 3:05 PM

    Whatever Jane Street is, it’s not big enough to justify that abomination of a popover-riddled mobile site.

  • by belinder on 5/2/24, 11:55 AM

    Why do they say 179,000 million instead of 179 billion? Is that common in their industry?

  • by dangoodmanUT on 5/2/24, 1:10 PM

    Just got 86 popups trying to look at this page

  • by wuj on 5/2/24, 7:55 PM

    Yeah, quants firms are great at PR and marketing. They give out free merch, sponsor hackathons, and organize in-person events with all expenses paid. I study at Berkeley and so many students here rock their merch, which gave them even more exposure on campus.

    Their effort definitely paid off though. Quants like JS, Citadel, or Jump hire some of the brightest students from Berkeley and other top CS schools.

  • by peterhadlaw on 5/2/24, 11:26 AM

    They discriminate employment based on what school you go to, or at least they did circa 2013

  • by mschuster91 on 5/2/24, 1:30 PM

    > net trading revenues of $4.4bn in the first quarter

    That's a lot of money for someone who is essentially a middle-man. What a grift, about 13 dollars for each average American lost out to them a quarter.

  • by paxys on 5/2/24, 12:51 PM

    > The only founder still at the firm is Rob Granieri, but insiders say it is functionally run by roughly 30-40 senior executives in what kinda resembles an incredibly profitable anarchist commune. Or as Jane Street itself puts it:

    > We operate as a functionally-organized structure consisting of various management and risk committees. Each committee is responsible for directing the overall strategy of the firm and for emphasizing the importance of risk management to our operations. Each of our trading desks and business units is run by equity unit holders who take an active role in managing our day-to-day operations [...]. Our management structure allows for effective cross-departmental communication [...].

    Yes, that org structure full of hierarchical business units with distinct responsibilities and committees and subcommittees and overseers and risk management totally screams "anarchy"...

  • by chronic830021 on 5/2/24, 11:52 AM

    > Double the profit per employee than Google

    > Average TC of 900K

    > Several unranked billionaires

    it makes even OpenAI / Meta ML SWEs look underpaid

  • by hendzen on 5/2/24, 11:44 AM

    Jane Street made 4.4bn net income in Q1 2024 w/ 2600 employees.

    Tether made 4.5bn net income in Q1 2024 w/ probably <50 employees.