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“Hedge funds will go to great lengths in pursuit of #profits, whether it is by counting cars in satellite photos of parking lots or shipping gold across the Atlantic. Building a #compiler—a piece of #software that turns human-written code into programs a computer can execute—for your homegrown language? That still raises eyebrows.

#JaneStreet is the quant shops’ quant shop, and it does just that, with great success. Last year its trading revenue almost doubled, to $21bn, putting it on a par with giants such as #Citigroup and #MorganStanley. And the goose that lays the golden egg is its #tech system.

But it is what this system is built from that is really unusual. Other firms employ a hotchpotch of #ProgrammingLanguages, allowing staff to choose the right one for the job. At Jane Street almost everyone works in an obscure tongue developed by French academics: #OCaml.

Ask a #trader at the firm for its benefits and they will reel off a string of features, such as its support for #StaticTyping and #FunctionalProgramming, that make it hard to learn but powerful when applied to a problem. The company says the language helps “maximise the #productivity of each person we hire”.”

#HedgeFunds / #finance <https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2025/06/26/jane-streets-sneaky-retention-tactic> (paywall) / <https://archive.md/DQ0ku>