It also could be that Jane Street succeeded regardless or even despite OCaml. At the end of the day OCaml isn't going to ensure that your trading strategies work. It's not going to suddenly create alpha. But I do suspect they've gotten serious hiring and marketing returns by using OCaml. And benefited the OCaml ecosystem as a byproduct, which is a pretty solid side-effect, even if side effects are not very functional :D
The idea that the language is part of their success is simply absurd. If anything having to have to develop and maintain an entire ecosystem probably slowed them down more than anything.
It’s gonna happen and it’s gonna be Rust
> you could stand to use a language like Rust that has an ecosystem and interoperability with C++.
Indeed :)
Even interns make $120/hr: https://www.levels.fyi/internships/
Yes, we've heard that yadda yadda, Caroline Ellison, SBF, etc...
They pay VERY VERY well indeed.
I have no connection or interest in Jane Street but this sure gives me a positive impression of the company.
Gotta have a PhD in pure math though. That shit is bananas.
Some of these companies I have never even heard of before having entered CS—Jane Street, Citadel, HRT, DRW, Ansatz, Two Sigma... Their names and websites are cryptic, and their job position listings are even more so, unless one knows that they're mostly proprietary traders—in other words, making money for money's own sake.
It feels dirty and excessively capitalist—these companies don't even have products to show for all their effort. Any clients they do have probably already make millions to billions, too.
My friends defend themselves by saying 'HFTs make money by keeping the market liquid', 'there's nothing wrong with arbitrage', etc. That's fair, but I still feel that's just sugar-coating what I said.
At the same time, I don't really say anything in person to my friends, because, well, they're friends, and secondly, my lousy grades make me feel thoroughly unqualified to make any sort of criticism.
I personally would rather do embedded, automotive, avionics, or game engine development. I just wish I had someone to discuss this with. Hardly anyone I know wants to do these instead, because the salary is lousy to above average, the hours are as bad, and especially game development is considered a mostly rubbish job to have. It really sucks, because I've gamed all my life and always found video games pretty damn amazing, both technically and just in general. It was a pretty bad bubble-bursting moment when I discovered just how bad the game dev situation was—overwork, crunch, sexual abuse and sexism, bean-counter-led design and marketing decisions.
I'm not looking for 100% job satisfaction (I accept even the most exciting work will have its dull periods), but it would be nice if the thing I spent 8-10 hours a day doing for a salary was something that remotely excited me and others, instead of just mindlessly piping money from X to Y and back just because it paid half a million a year.
Ironically they only really keep the market liquid when the sun in shining. When there is a big crash and you really need liquidity most HFTs disappear.
They have put a lot of highly paid human traders out of business though which is something. The C++ devs might be earning a lot but its less than their predecessors.
A lot of HFTs have their own training programs anyway for the job specific knowledge, so it is more important to build up the right base math and/or dev background than to hyper fixate on HFTs all of undergrad, even if your end career goal is to make bank.
Interesting. Crypto has much less liquidly overnight compared to other markets, no? How would this work? Coinbase?
(How I know, 25 years writing exchanges).
How to Build an Exchange (2017) [video] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27879230 - July 2021 (12 comments)
I've been using the .NET port of Disruptor to good success. Once you understand the underlying pattern, you can apply it everywhere without pulling in a dependency.
You would be astonished at what will actually fit on 1 x86 thread in 2023. Instruction-level parallelism can give you unbelievable throughput, assuming your batches are reasonably-sized and everything fits neatly into the various caches.
Other related links:
https://martinfowler.com/articles/lmax.html
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qDhTjE0XmkE [Evolution of Financial Exchange Architectures]
doesn't the sub-milisecond speed contradict to the several hours pause in trading?
wouldn't be possible to impose some kind of a delay (say an hour) on all participants?
I feel obliged to attest that the people I knew working at Jane Street at that time were some of the straightest shooters one could know. My anecdote is that SBF's toxicity didn't originate in their culture. Perhaps it was a counteraction to it, if anything.
What really gave FTX a competitive advantage was its cross-margining system. It was super easy to post collateral in any supported asset, and all open positions were automatically margined against each other. So if you were doing something like pairs trades between spot and futures, you didn't need to constantly monitor and manually move capital between the silos. In hindsight though it's not clear if this was possible because of better engineering, or just because Alameda was internalizing all the risk.
https://www.forbes.com/profile/gary-wang-1/
It's intriguing how Forbes 400 list includes criminals. If someone tricks people into "investing" with them and they accumulate enough billions of US dollars, and it takes a few years for the authorities to act, then do they get a spot on the Forbes 400. What are the rules.
Everything would be in a different context, yes. But how would the content be different?
How?
