“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>
“The big news this morning is that India’s #FinancialRegulator has banned #JaneStreet from the country’s markets for a “sinister scheme” to manipulate Indian #stocks and #derivatives.
The Securities and Exchange Board of #India allege that the #US trading firm made $550mn of illegal gains from these strategies, which it is now wants back before the ban will be lifted”
<https://www.ft.com/content/41c4789a-afa6-462c-a6ea-9704c2ba78a7> (paywall) / <https://archive.md/dnE3V>
@peterrenshaw it’s telling that the only place I know Jane Street for is hiring ads on 3blue1brown and Veritasium and Numberphile …
@darkuncle
“Lisp is worth learning for the profound enlightenment experience you will have when you finally get it; that experience will make you a better programmer for the rest of your days, even if you never actually use Lisp itself a lot” — Eric Raymond
Paul Graham noted a similar strategy as a sort of intelligence sieve. Those interested in learning an obscure non imperative (OC is ML, not purely functional) computer language were motivated not by money, but by curiosity alone.* The alternative? Blub programming.
<https://paulgraham.com/avg.html>
* OC is functional but ticks the “type-safe, compiled with static analysis & well tooled” boxes.
@darkuncle the “building a complier” line tells me the author isn’t an SE, programmer or someone who hacks. They also missed an important point: “when you're writing software that only has to run on your own servers, you can use any language you want.” — pg.
I’ll bet Jane Street use their own #servers.
@peterrenshaw given what little exposure I've had to high frequency trading and quant outfits, optimizing to gain milliseconds can result in millions in profit over the course of a year, so I wouldn't be surprised.