What is Jane Street? Is it an electronic trading firm? Is it a hedge fund? Is it a venture capital firm? Is it a fun egalitarian place to hang out where people wear shorts and flip flops and play poker and Call of Duty in lunch breaks?
Maybe it’s all this and more. As Jane Street grows up, it’s opening up. A Wall Street Journal reporter has peered inside. He’s seen rows of mostly men displaying their calves in open-toed shoes. He’s seen the poker games and the video games. And Jane Street itself has been elaborating on what it takes to join these ranks.
💥Follow us on WhatsApp for news alerts.💥
Jane Street likes to hire “smart curious people with really good CS backgrounds,” its co-head of computing Ron Minksy told YouTuber Dwarkesh Patel last month. Jane Street likes to hire people with backgrounds “like math and CS and physics and engineering and stuff to be traders. But it also likes “physical engineers” with backgrounds in mechanical engineering, structural engineering and electronic engineering to work on its physical spaces. It really wants people who’ve worked for hyperscalers (technology companies that operate their own data centres). It wants people who can design and train LLMs. And it wants mathematicians to work on a newly conceived formal methods team “using mathematical proof to make software engineering more effective,” suggested Minsky.
Jane Street is building is own data centres. Bloomberg reported earlier this month that the firm plans to build a new data facility whose location has yet to be determined. Right now, it has tens of thousands of GPUs, but soon it will be it will have “hundreds of thousands of GPUs” proclaimed Minksy. It needs a lot of “general compute” people to achieve this. “Every day there’s more data, and we’re digesting it and processing it faster,” says Adam Canady, a Jane Street engineer who works on machine learning, informed the Wall Street Journal.
Even while Jane Street goes big on GPUs, though, it still needs humans of the kinds listed above. “Humans ad human-like cognition are more valuable than ever,” Minsky told Patel. Jane Street makes the most money on days when weird and crazy things happen and when no one knows, said Minsky. Those days require human judgement. No one wants to provide liquidity and if Jane Street can do it, profits are greater than usual.
Jane Street needs humans with this kind of judgement because it is still fundamentally a liquidity provider. Although it operates a $20bn portfolio of investments in private companies, Jane Street’s core business is making markets in almost everything. But the WSJ notes that Jane Street’s speciality is still evaluating the price of an ETF compared to the securities or derivatives underlying it and trading to take advantage of discrepancies that emerge.
Jane Street is doubling the size of its London office and there are growing opportunities to wear shorts on a $300k salary in its low key headquarters at Brookfield Place in New York. There, you will sit under circadian lighting and be ingested into Jane Street’s “insular” but “collegial” culture where no one knows exactly what their personal p&l is. Don’t get too comfortable: Jane Street likes to keep its humans fresh by moving their desks around a few times each year.
Separately, private equity firms are having trouble exiting historic investments and paying their people carried interest, but it’s ok. Bloomberg notes that they are still paying carried interest by performing dividend recapitalizations in which they simply add more debt to portfolio companies so that they can pay themselves. $3.5bn of these recapitalizations have occurred in the past four weeks alone.
Meanwhile…
Tower is now quoting prices in more than 500 fixed-income exchange traded funds, up from 30 nine months ago, according to people familiar with the matter. Tower wants to quote more than 1,000 US-listed fixed-income ETFs. (Financial Times)
Citadel Securities almost certainly had an exceptional second quarter after US equities trading volumes soared. (Rupak Ghose)
Deutsche Bank’s chief information officer says AI is having a dramatic effect: “”We’re seeing things that were two years that are now getting done in three to six months… we know the productivity is there.” Cost is an issue though. (Reuters)
KPMG says AI is changing entry level jobs which now require capabilities traditionally associated with mid- or late-career roles. These include management, strategy, decision-making and apply to jobs with only two years of professional experience. (Financial Times)
Goldman Sachs pioneered “returnships” for people who’ve had career breaks. It’s still offering them, but places like Starling, KPMG and the Bank of England have discontinued theirs. (Financial Times)
The Bank of England is reconsidering the new rules that would require banks to use standardised models to estimate market risk in their trading books, instead of models of their own. It said these rules “may be more capital-intensive and operationally burdensome than originally intended”, and could “impose material compliance and operational costs that are disproportionate to their prudential benefits”. (Financial Times)
“French politician Jean-Luc Mélenchon once proposed a policy of 100% income tax over €400,000 (£350,000). I said I’m totally in favour of that, but think the threshold should be lower. Nobody should earn more than £200,000.” (Guardian)
Iran’s Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei built a sprawling global investment portfolio with exposure to Wall Street banks. Those banks are being scrutinised, including JPMorgan and Citi. (Bloomberg)
Follow me on X. Follow me on LinkedIn.
Have a confidential story, tip, or comment you’d like to share? Contact: +44 7537 182250 (SMS, Whatsapp or voicemail). Telegram: @SarahButcher. Signal: sarahbutcher.22 Click here to fill in our anonymous form, or email editortips@efinancialcareers.com.
Bear with us if you leave a comment at the bottom of this article: comments are moderated intermittently by human beings. Sometimes these humans might be asleep, or away from their desks, so it may take a while for your comment to appear. You must take sole responsibility for comments you post on this site. We will take reasonable steps to weed out anything that we consider to be offensive or inappropriate.
Leave a comment