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SV knows very little about trading. Jane Street will be fine. Joining now is akin to working at a bank in the early 00’s. Probably too late to make superyacht money, but still a good opportunity that most college grads would kill for. There was a big boost when @sama announced that they were recruiting quants; quite a few of the ‘MIT’ school of quant firms have been losing staff to the AI shops recently, particularly HRT. Anecdotally, Jane Street has the most brand recognition, at least amongst YC partners. Different types of trading firm One of the least discussed (and therefore most misunderstood) points is that ‘quant’ firms have extremely different modus operandi. The Chicago School Chicago is home to CME: the biggest futures exchange in the world. When CME released their first API, some of the smart floor traders saw the writing on the wall and hired programmers to automate their deep trading intuition. They were called the ‘upstairs traders’, because they worked from offices on the floor above the pit. These firms view trading from a game-theoretic lens. Juniors are trained on poker and chess games, and the culture is that software is a tool to automate and speed up what is fundamentally a financial game. Traders sit in front of big screens with dashboards (and sometimes Bloomberg terminals) and aren’t afraid to intervene if they see something the models don’t. Quants work for traders. Traders can, and do, put on discretionary trades. Interviews are full of mind-bending brainteasers, but probably not any ML questions. SIG (and its offspring, like Jane Street) and DRW are the big examples here. Jump started out in Chicago, but now operates more like an ‘MIT School’ shop. The MIT School On the other side are the nerds who see the markets as a big stats and engineering problem. They solely hire people with backgrounds in hard science, and shun finance grads. Strategies are tested and deployed in a rigorous manner akin more to the software lifecycle at big tech. Quants find alpha, and ‘traders’ simply monitor and deploy their strategies without a risk mandate. Citadel Securities, HRT and Tower are firmly in this school. Which is Best? Here’s the best part: all of these firms are VERY profitable. Many ways to skin a cat. The MIT School works best when on efficient, liquid markets, where the models have a lot of data to train on and sudden changes in regime are rare. Think US equities, CME futures, and so on. The Chicago school works best on the rest: when markets are thin, prone to sudden shocks, or have a heavy broker-drive OTC element. Think EU equity options, rare commodities like palladium, frontier equities. Misc There are an unlikely number of Dutch HFTs (IMC, Optiver, and its offspring like Flow and Akuna). Most are in the Chicago School style, and have their US offices in Chicago. The most convincing argument I’ve heard for this is that one of the only banks that would clear HFT firms when it was a new industry was ABN Amro: a Dutch bank. If someone has a better idea, feel free to correct me. If you want to get inside the mind of someone trained at Jane Street, @AgustinLebron3 book ‘The Laws of Trading’ is a great read. And fwiw, I do think the allure of quant firms is dying - working at a bank in the 00's was certainly lucrative, but I don't hear anyone bragging about it now.