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.<p>[0] <a href="https://www.youtube.com/user/standupmaths" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/user/standupmaths</a>
[1] <a href="https://signalsandthreads.com/" rel="nofollow">https://signalsandthreads.com/</a>
[2] <a href="https://www.janestreet.com/puzzles/current-puzzle/" rel="nofollow">https://www.janestreet.com/puzzles/current-puzzle/</a>
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.
> At the end of 2023, Jane Street employed 2631 people<p>> About 80 per cent of the company's capital comes from employee equity, which has swelled to $21.3bn at the end of 2023<p>o.O
Great comment from the FT's comments section on this piece.<p>> 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.<p>Along with a reminder that disasters happen when businesses forget this (Boeing!)
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...<p>Meanwhile I'd love to know what their edge is... It's probably more than OCaml, although... ;)
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?"<p>And one of the answers was Jane St. Apparently they produce great engineers.
> 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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>Five times the London Stock Exchange’s entire trading volumes in 2023 in just your ETF arm? Sure ... this sounds like reasonable growth ...<p>> This is why some people argue that APs like Jane Street have become systemically important.<p>Oh, you don't say!<p>> About 80 per cent of the company’s capital comes from employee equity<p>That's adorable. They're like a little mom-and-pop shop ... except not anything like that.
> it accounted for 10.4 per cent of all North American equity trading in 2023<p>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").<p>I even wonder if their system has already learned cornering by itself via stochastic gradient descent.
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.<p>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.
> net trading revenues of $4.4bn in the first quarter<p>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.
> 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:<p>> 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 [...].<p>Yes, that org structure full of hierarchical business units with distinct responsibilities and committees and subcommittees and overseers and risk management totally screams "anarchy"...
> Double the profit per employee than Google<p>> Average TC of 900K<p>> Several unranked billionaires<p>it makes even OpenAI / Meta ML SWEs look underpaid