> Jane Street has generated more than $40bn in net trading revenues in the year to Friday, even accounting for the July loss, which exceeds its entire haul for 2025, according to one of the people familiar with the matter.
This would make JS one of the most profitable trading firms of all time even with the loss.
Basically profit from trading before they pay for salaries and office rent and all that jazz.
It's easy to make paper billions with synthetic shares and infinite deadline extensions for settlement. I'm old and still remember when Ken Griffin was lauded a clever person before he got caught with his hands in the GME mayo jar..
HFT doesn't cost retail investors anything.
HN guidelines do request use of original title and in this specific case the change of title is misleading by implying that situational awareness directly caused losses at JS.
In the text it says "the US trading firm was wrongfooted during last month’s market ructions including the meltdown at AI-focused hedge fund Situational Awareness" so while SA is mentioned the implications of a direct link to the losses is less strong.
edit: more detail in https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/jane-street-took-15... confirms some losses linked directly to SA and some losses to their own positions.
Correlation is not causation.
Pretty short so I imagine more details and analysis are forthcoming.
On a more serious note, Jane Street has hired some very impressive technical talent. I'd work for them, myself, if I didn't have to relocate to Chicago.
They have $140B AUM.
So they are up ~18%.
https://observer.com/2024/11/jane-street-quantitative-tradin...
Obviously I'm not entitled to a job, so no hard feelings on that, but it's a little sad because I have always been a big functional programming nerd and it would be fun to work with Ocaml libraries. The fact that they pay really well is also appealing...
No, even better: they're still up $40B for the year.
"Jane Street has offices in some of the world’s most dynamic cities, including a presence in Amsterdam, Chicago, Hong Kong, London, New York and Singapore."
https://www.janestreet.com/culture/benefits/?office=nyc&view... (scroll down)
[1] https://www.ft.com/content/28a51284-98cc-4767-a306-0540d2656...
When Leopold went to pitch NY investors they all passed and thought he was full of it. He could only convince California tech guys. Savvy finance guys saw SA for what it was (leveraged beta trade). Jane street are finance guys, not California tech bros.
This is completely illogical. If they knew it was going to tank, they wouldn’t invest.
As conspiracy theories go, this one doesn’t even have a leg to stand on.
...
I'll see myself out.
And yes, Anthropic included.
Personally I have mixed feelings about what they do. The engineer in me used to root for them. The way they operate as a pure tech shop was very refreshing in the hedge fund/traditional finance world (crypto world is the opposite). But the trader in me now abhors how they make their money, that is arguably at the expense of retail traders.
But he is very entertaining and has more than a veneer of authority. His early educational YouTube videos covering topics like derivatives pricing are genuinely very good.
Which is a common story these days. Nothing wrong with that, there are worse people who become the Youtube-content guy. I've just gone down that road enough times to know to eject early.
Speaking for myself only, but if I were going to post a comment like yours on a public forum insinuating doubts about a specific person and vaguely implying their analysis is not trustworthy, I'd come armed with at least once example.
So you can blame him for that style lately, but its not all he can do.
https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/jane-street-took-15...