Transcript

GET TO KNOW US | JANE STREET

Hi, my name is Lars, and I work as a trader here in our London office, and I started in 2020.

WHAT ARE THE MAIN RESPONSIBILITIES OF TRADERS AT JANE STREET?

As a trader at Jane Street, you do mainly three different kinds of things. One is that you investigate different trading ideas, and you can call this research. One other is that we monitor and watch our trading systems and make adjustments to them in order to do the trading that we want. And the third is more of a coding part of the job, where you would write code to either improve the monitoring of our systems or to implement a new strategy. All traders probably do a bit of each of those three. Me personally, I work more on research and coding than I watch trading, but that is also something that is changing through time and that is very different between different people.

WHAT DID YOU STUDY AND HOW DID IT HELP YOU PREPARE FOR A JOB AT JANE STREET?

At university, I studied engineering and maths and computer science and that has helped me in my job at Jane Street because we do a lot of analysis using different mathematical tools and we also have automated systems that need to be programmed.

WHAT CLASSES DO YOU RECOMMEND I TAKE?

There are some courses that I would recommend you taking before starting at Jane Street, and that includes probabilities and statistics. The courses you take are not the most important thing because we will teach you everything that you need to know in order to do the job in a good way. I would recommend taking courses that you enjoy because when you enjoy a course, you probably learn more about it. And that means you can use it better when you start working.

DO I NEED TO HAVE EXPERIENCE IN FINANCE TO WORK AS A TRADER AT JANE STREET?

When you start at Jane Street, either as an intern or as a full timer, you don’t need to have any prior financial knowledge. All the knowledge that you need to have in order to do the job we will be able to teach you when you get here. It’s always good to have an interest in finance and in financial markets and how they are related to each other. But you don’t need to know much before you start here.

WHAT WAS YOUR EXPERIENCE AS A TRADING INTERN LIKE?

I was an intern in 2019, and during our trading internship, you will learn a lot about financial markets and how we think about them. During the internship, we will both have classes where you get to learn about new concepts, but you will also have projects where you will work with a mentor who is one of the full-time traders. One thing that surprised me during the internship was the amount of time we got to spend with full timers and how much we got to learn from them.

WHAT TYPE OF TRAINING DO NEW TRADERS GO THROUGH?

When you start as a full-time trader at Jane Street, we have a lot of training prepared. It starts with boot camp where you would learn OCaml, which is the coding language that we use in Jane Street’s systems. Then, for a full year, you would get to learn about the different desks and different departments of Jane Street. That lasts for a year, where you both work on one team, but you also learn about more teams throughout the firm.

HOW LONG DID IT TAKE YOU TO FEEL FULLY INTEGRATED INTO THE WORK AS A TRADER?

When you start a full timer, we do have a lot of training, but you also get to have a real impact on the training that we’re doing, very early on. After only a few weeks, I had done some projects that affected how we trade in the markets. That was obviously supervised by other people, and I got help in understanding those relationships. But it was pretty cool to see that things I worked on were used so quickly.

WHAT ADVICE DO YOU HAVE FOR INTERNS AND NEW HIRES?

The main advice I would give to new hires or interns or people coming to Jane Street in general would be to ask many questions and be curious about things. There are so many people here that know so much about different financial products, but also other things, and they are very happy to give you their time and to explain some concepts to you. And the more questions you ask and the more curious you are, the more you will learn.