Transcript

Get to Know Us | Jane Street

Hi, I’m Nancy. I am a trader in the London office and I started in 2017.

What did you study in school and how did it help you prepare for a job at Jane Street?

In uni I studied math and I’d say that it’s the problem solving aspects of this degree that is more directly useful to my job today, rather than anything specifically theoretical.

What classes do you recommend I take?

I think that it’s more important to prioritize things that you find interesting enough to be curious and ask questions and think about, but for anything specific, I would recommend probability and programming. Probability because I find that on the trading floor, we tend to use the language of basic probability quite a lot in communicating how we think about things. And programming is because it’s a skill that is useful on the job and is something that I didn’t quite have much background in and wished that I had at the start of the job.

What is a trading internship project like?

An example of a project that you might work on is that it’s usually going to be investigating some effect in the marketplace that your mentor has hypothesized from the trading that they watch. Usually they’ll like set out the question to you and suggest a framework for how to approach this, but it will be up to you to decide how you’re going to use statistical tools and how you’re going to interpret the results that you get from your data.

How long did it take before you felt like you had real responsibilities as a full timer?

It’s pretty easy to pinpoint the moment that I sent my first order into the marketplace as a moment of real responsibility. This happened about four months after I joined. I think four months in is about when I felt more like the primary person responsible for watching a relatively small strategy.

How is working at Jane Street different than you expected?

Something that I did find unexpected was I was taught that even a low confidence opinion could be a valuable input into how a desk thinks about things, which I thought was pretty cool.

One of the things I love the most about Jane Street is how global the entire company feels. It’s really cool to have lots of opportunities to talk and work really closely on problems with, um, my colleagues in Hong Kong and New York. I like how having an office in each of the different time zones means that we can collaborate really seamlessly.