Jane Street Capital

For the Jane Street see the road in Toronto
Jane Street Capital logo

Jane Street Capital, typically referred to as Jane Street, is a global proprietary trading firm founded in 2000 that operates in New York City, London, and Hong Kong[1] with around 400 employees.[2]

Trading

Jane Street is active in markets in New York City, London, and Hong Kong. It may trade about $8 billion of equities worldwide and conduct about a million trades per day.[1][3] As of April 2015, it claimed to be responsible for 2% of daily equity trading volume in the United States.[2] Jane Street specializes in exchange-traded funds (ETFs); they quote more than 2,000 ETFs in real time.[4]

Technology

Jane Street is, as of 2014, one of only a few hundred businesses (across all sectors) that use the OCaml programming language.[5] It adopted OCaml as its main programming language early on because the language's functional programming style and clear expressiveness made it possible for code reviews to be performed by traders who were not programmers, to verify that high-performance code would do what it was intended to do. Jane Street has stated OCaml's advantages thusly: “OCaml helps us to quickly adapt to changing market conditions, and go from prototypes to production systems with less effort...Billions of dollars of transactions flow through our systems every day, so getting it right matters”.[5] Furthermore, OCaml's "rigor is like catnip to some people, though, giving Jane Street an unusual advantage in the tight hiring market for programmers" that allows Jane Street to "lure a steady supply of high-quality candidates".[2]

Jane Street has released some open source code on GitHub that includes their versions of standard OCaml libraries.[6]

Culture

A number of people involved with the effective altruism movement have recommended Jane Street Capital as a place to work at for people considering earning to give, and some of the full-time employees as well as interns have been from the effective altruist community.[7][8][9][10][11] In September 2012, Tim Reynolds, one of Jane Street's co-founders, stepped down from the job to redirect his energies towards the philanthropic pursuit of teaching poor students to master photorealistic painting.[12]

There is also a culture of "competitive intelligence", and sometimes employees play bughouse[2] (four-person chess), a break-room game also commonly played at most tech companies.

References

  1. 1 2 "Our Story". Jane Street Capital. Retrieved August 1, 2014.
  2. 1 2 3 4 James Somers (April 2, 2015). "Toolkits for the Mind". MIT Technology Review.
  3. ↑ Levitt, David M. (June 16, 2014). "Brookfield Said Near Lease Deal With Jane Street Capital". Bloomberg.com. Retrieved August 1, 2014.
  4. ↑ "What we do: ETFs". Jane Street Capital. Retrieved August 1, 2014.
  5. 1 2 "Companies using OCaml". OCaml.org. Retrieved 17 August 2014.
  6. ↑ "Open Source @ Jane Street". Jane Street Capital. Retrieved August 1, 2014.
  7. ↑ MacAskill, William (February 27, 2013). "To save the world, don’t get a job at a charity; go work on Wall Street". The Effective Altruism Forum. Retrieved September 30, 2014.
  8. ↑ Kuhn, Ben. "My current plans". Retrieved September 30, 2014.
  9. ↑ "EA ventures". Retrieved November 24, 2015.
  10. ↑ "Trading in quantitative hedge funds". Retrieved November 24, 2015.
  11. ↑ Ravenscroft, Alice (July 9, 2014). "Is Effective Altruism Set to Grow?". Retrieved September 30, 2014.
  12. ↑ Faux, Zeke (November 9, 2012). "Jane Street’s Reynolds Turns to Art With Trading Fortune". Bloomberg.com.

External links

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