Medallion has probably gotten more scrutiny than any other fund, yet 3 decades later it's still as opaque as ever beyond vague 'statistical methods'. It makes a lot of money no matter what. It's more tight-lipped and exclusive than Jane Street. I don't even think anyone knows even if it's doing market making or not. Or if it's making short-term directional bets. You would think after 30 years stuff would leak and the edge would be gone. Employees are paid enough to not disclose, and likely are divulged only a small part of the overall method/system, so only a handful of employees will know how it works in its entirety. What it's doing has to be on a very large scale and in a big and liquid market to be so consistent and profitable.
Of course, the 30%+ annual returns almost every year for 30 years doesn't hurt the mystique either ;)
It's interesting that their other funds are far more mundane in terms of performance and last I heard Medallion can't hold much capital (~10B or so I've heard in whispers), but there is definitely something interesting as hell going on there.
Near as I can tell it's the hardest job to get on Earth. Rumor mill is that they pre-screen candidate based on their citation record in the literature, though that's obviously hearsay and I don't know if it's true.
The emphasis on published work rang a bell, but thumbing through the book I can't find it off hand.
Another friend at G said the “smartest person in the office was poached by this company TGS, have you heard of them?”
Everything about them is boring. They're well paid sure, but they're based in long island and hire mostly grey beards and don't overhire. Compare that to Jane Street hiring interns jumping through silly hoops like betting poker chips on puzzles. It's a bit of a farce.
Theoretically other firms could copy this, but the main goal of a hedge fund manager is keeping AUM. High AUM and poor performance is better than low AUM and strong performance. So its a lot easier to optimize on maximizing AUM and managing your brand. There aren't a lot of mathematicians that start hedge funds so the people starting them already seed the company with the wrong culture to replicate RenTech.
What I've been told is that Rentech also effectively use their public funds as a source of revenue to juice development of proprietary platform, so some of it is business cunning rather than a hard technical edge.
They were also got on the quant train very early.
https://sniperinmahwah.wordpress.com/2018/05/07/shortwave-tr...
The speed (latency) of the EM spectrum is the effective celerity of the medium: this doesn't differ in the air between microwave and shortwave in any meaningful way.
The speed (throughput) achievable on a given frequency is limited by the period of that frequence, high wavelengths can modulate more signal. Microwaves are higher frequency than radio by definition, so they have a higher throughput.
Neutrinos don't exceed the speed of light, and make a very bad medium of transmission given the near-complete lack of interaction with baryonic matter.
As you say the downside is available bandwidth and throughput.
Either way it's more sensible to build high throughput microwave networks given the tiny amount of shortwave bandwidth we have.
Most markets, in terms of their daily volume, are open at night, but very thinly traded until EU hours, but some do see action in Asia hours. It’s just about liquidity.
Maybe you’re thinking of single name equity markets, which are a fraction of daily trading.
I think the one of the main reasons is government concerns about shenanigans happen overnight without oversight / flash crash. That being said I presume all the breakers that would halt trading activity are probably automatic but potentially not all of them (I think the US did things like that during the housing collapse).
That's a maybe. Still, good point.
0. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2019-03-08/the-gazil...
That's more than enough on the instrument math side, most of what you'll see is pretty mundane stuff, unless you end up on an exotics structuring desk.
I'd also note that JS and other MMs mostly don't do anything requiring you to know the intimate details of these things, a lot of it is understanding how the market works rather than the deep instrument math. That might mean other kinds of math of course.
Thanks for the material!
I always throught market microstructure was more important, but they insisted a disciplined application of the maths (as per the bible of Hull) was where the magic really was.
Then, you can quickly read Bjoerk, work through Brigo/Mercurio (if you like that style) or Andersen/Piterbarg. Alternatively, if you want to fully dive into into the subject after Shreve, Musiela/Rutkowski: "Martingale Methods in Financial Modelling" is wonderful.
I've been trying to put myself through YouTube night school on some of this stuff, and MIT OCW has great resources as well at significantly less cost than going to MIT ;)
This is a pretty reasonable jumping off point for their corpus of financial engineering stuff: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HdHlfiOAJyE.
I'm fortunate enough to work with a person who actually understands derivatives trades with some sophistication, but that's a happy accident and the more people have access to good online resources the better!
Edit: I forgot to mention this book (https://www.amazon.com/Algorithmic-Trading-DMA-introduction-...) in the spirit of something more technical than the general-audience one I linked above. I have some nitpicks with it as well, but I've gotten value out of it.
(And to pile on, The Blind Side was the touching story of how Lewis’s prep school classmate, an Ole Miss booster, gamed the system to provide improper benefits to a high school recruit.)
It's a decent book, and a decent movie (kudos for one particular scene where I recognized data from the actual LoanPerformance database) I actually prefer the movie Margin Call for more accurately capturing the feel of the crisis from inside a bank.
Another compounding factor is people often assume the message is "banks bad" but it's more "oh this system was so complex that any one individual did not understand the impact of their decision(s), much much more than everyone/anyone was playing super fast and loose from their particular perspective "
On a different but related note, I also really enjoyed the Compleat Ubernerd, written by Tanta, all about mortgage servicing in the mid 2000s: https://www.calculatedriskblog.com/2007/07/compleat-ubernerd...
I'm not sure how it has aged (no Dodd-Frank updates, the author has passed away) but it was glorious in its time.
https://www.newyorkfed.org/medialibrary/media/research/staff...
The CR blog was not the same after she passed away.
(On Tanta's passing: https://www.calculatedriskblog.com/2008/11/sad-news-tanta-pa...)
It certainly seems like an interesting place to work, but I find their hiring process as a bit of a red flag. Places that hire like that confuse me, because it seems it's going to apply a very selective filter to applicants that make it through. And I don't meant selective in the sense of technical ability but more emotional, social, and thinking styles. I get incredibly nervous in technical interviews and with a wide background, I don't always know certain bits of computer science. So, I do terrible in these style of interviews, because they do nothing to expose what I do know or how I really think on projects.
As another point of why I don't think they work, they almost are never two-way. And if they were, it would show the pointlessness of them. If I asked interviewers a bunch of questions about things that I know about, then we'd just be trading blows, which is pointless.
This is a bit like saying you find the hiring process at the NFL or for SEAL teams a red flag. You either fall through the selection sieve or you don't, that's the whole point. The filter has served its purpose, and they end up with the elite high-performing teams they desire. There's nothing wrong with you or the filter if you don't make it. The filter clearly does work because Jane St prints cash like the Fed and is one of the top MM firms out there.
Of course Jane Street is successful! There's no question there. However, I don't think it's much of a question that they probably miss out on some great candidates that don't fit into that type of hiring process. It's possible they view those as acceptable losses.
> it's an interesting format: viewing an industry through the lens of a particular firm
What's interesting about that? Almost every other article does that.
If this stuff floats your boat I'd also recommend any of Carl Cook's talks, e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NH1Tta7purM. Optiver is AFAIK in a somewhat different business than Jane, but they're also players (or were last I had any inside baseball).
Too many people got their worldview on this industry from "Flash Boys", and I say this as a Lewis fan, is criminally stupid at best and in bad faith at worst (if you want a well-researched, accessible alternative: https://www.amazon.com/Trading-Speed-Light-Algorithms-Transf... is about a zillion times better).
It's a pretty short list of places I'd ever go through some grueling and semi-arbitrary gauntlet to work for, but Jane is on it for sure.
I hope the author(s) do Medallion next.