Jane Street Capital, typically referred to as Jane Street, is a global

proprietary trading Proprietary trading (also known as prop trading) occurs when a trader trades stocks, bonds, currencies, commodities, their derivatives, or other financial instruments with the firm's own money (instead of using depositors' money) in order to m ...

firm. Today, Jane Street Capital employs more than 2,000 people in five offices around the world, located in New York,

London London is the capital and largest city of England and the United Kingdom, with a population of just under 9 million. It stands on the River Thames in south-east England at the head of a estuary down to the North Sea, and has been a majo ...

Hong Kong Hong Kong ( (US) or (UK); , ), officially the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of the People's Republic of China ( abbr. Hong Kong SAR or HKSAR), is a city and special administrative region of China on the eastern Pearl River Delt ...

Amsterdam Amsterdam ( , , , lit. ''The Dam on the River Amstel'') is the Capital of the Netherlands, capital and Municipalities of the Netherlands, most populous city of the Netherlands, with The Hague being the seat of government. It has a population ...

Singapore Singapore (), officially the Republic of Singapore, is a sovereign island country and city-state in maritime Southeast Asia. It lies about one degree of latitude () north of the equator, off the southern tip of the Malay Peninsula, borde ...

. The firm trades a broad range of asset classes on more than 200 venues in 45 countries. The company is one of the world’s largest market-makers, trading more than $17 trillion worth of securities in 2020. It was considered to have helped keep bond

exchange-traded funds An exchange-traded fund (ETF) is a type of investment fund and exchange-traded product, i.e. they are traded on stock exchanges. ETFs are similar in many ways to mutual funds, except that ETFs are bought and sold from other owners throughout the ...

(ETFs) liquid during the market turmoil in 2020.

Founding

Jane Street was co-founded by Tim Reynolds, Rob Granieri, Marc Gerstein, and Michael Jenkins. Jane Street's website says the firm was founded in 2000. However, Reynolds reports it to have been founded in 1999, although the date varies between sources. According to New York state records, Jane Street Group, LLC was registered with the Division of Corporations in May of 2005 as a foreign corporation with a foreign formation date of August 31, 1999.

Technology

Jane Street is, , one of only a few hundred businesses (across all sectors) that use the

OCaml OCaml ( , formerly Objective Caml) is a general-purpose programming language, general-purpose, multi-paradigm programming language which extends the Caml dialect of ML (programming language), ML with object-oriented programming, object-oriented ...

programming language. It adopted

as its main programming language early on because the language's

functional programming In computer science, functional programming is a programming paradigm where programs are constructed by Function application, applying and Function composition (computer science), composing Function (computer science), functions. It is a declar ...

style and clear expressiveness made it possible for

code review Code review (sometimes referred to as peer review) is a software quality assurance activity in which one or several people check a program mainly by viewing and reading parts of its source code, and they do so after implementation or as an interru ...

s 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 that "OCaml helps us to quickly adapt to changing market conditions, and go from prototypes to production systems with less effort". Furthermore, OCaml's "rigor is like catnip to some people,... 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". Jane Street also takes advantage of programmable hardware like

FPGAs A field-programmable gate array (FPGA) is an integrated circuit designed to be configured by a customer or a designer after manufacturinghence the term '' field-programmable''. The FPGA configuration is generally specified using a hardware de ...

to implement some of the logic. Jane Street Capital grapples with tough problems. The firm's traders, researchers and software engineers work closely with each other to build trading systems and implement strategies. They are backed by experts in distributed systems, security, networking, IT, and compilers. Operations teams ranging from legal and compliance to finance, tax and human resources help complex global operations run smoothly. The firm's team works with clients to execute trades and provide liquidity. Jane Street has released some

open source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open-source model is a decentralized sof ...

code on

GitHub GitHub, Inc. () is an Internet hosting service for software development and version control using Git. It provides the distributed version control of Git plus access control, bug tracking, software feature requests, task management, continuous ...

that includes their versions of standard

libraries. In July 2020,

S&P Global Ratings S&P Global Ratings (previously Standard & Poor's and informally known as S&P) is an American credit rating agency (CRA) and a division of S&P Global that publishes financial research and analysis on stocks, bonds, and commodities. S&P is cons ...

affirmed Jane Street on capital growth. The rating agency noted that Jane Street is a "highly profitable trading business," that "the company has generated very strong earnings so far in 2020 and that its trading has benefited from the market volatility related to the COVID-19 pandemic." The company is at the forefront of attracting talent with hotel-like material benefits, allowing employees to develop their talents from the comfort of their offices.

References

External links

* {{Official website
BusinessWeek profile
Financial services companies established in 2000 Financial derivative trading companies Financial services companies of Hong Kong Financial services companies based in New York City