Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
Bloomberg, Audio Studios, podcasts, radio news. Jane Street is one
of Wall Street's most profitable trading firms. You've maybe heard
the name, but unless you're a Wall Street insider, you
might not know who they are or what exactly they do.
Speaker 2 (00:21):
They are the middleman in many ways.
Speaker 1 (00:25):
Catherine Doherty is a finance reporter for Bloomberg.
Speaker 3 (00:27):
Even though they are such a powerful player in finance,
you wouldn't really know that you are interacting with them
in the market.
Speaker 1 (00:35):
If you've ever bought stock on robin Hood or made
an investment with your retirement fund, chances are Jane Street
or a firm like it helped process that trade behind
the scenes. Every day, they facilitate billions of transactions between
buyers and sellers across markets.
Speaker 3 (00:52):
Jane Street is connected to all of the pipes, all
of the plumbing of the market.
Speaker 1 (00:58):
And that means Jane Street makes a lot of money
from trades. In twenty twenty four, its revenue was twenty
point five billion dollars, almost double what it brought in
in twenty twenty three. But that growth has also come
with new scrutiny. Earlier this month, India's main financial regulator
accused the firm of market manipulation. India's market regulator is
(01:20):
barring Jane Street from access to its local securities market.
It may actually be the biggest fine if it matializes ever,
you know, for such kind of market manipulation.
Speaker 2 (01:29):
Alleged market manipulation.
Speaker 1 (01:31):
Jane Street is called the regulator's conclusions fundamentally mistaken and
has said it will assess its legal options. But Catherine
says the rest of the industry is watching to see
whether this investigation sets off a reckoning that could change
the way firms like Jane Street operate around the world
and just how fast they might grow. I'm Sarah Holder,
(01:55):
and this is the big take from Bloomberg News Today.
On the show, we take a look at one of
Wall Street's most secretive firms, how Jane Street's trading got
it in hot water, and what that could mean for
regulation in a corner of the industry that not many
people pay attention to. Jane Street has a reputation as
(02:17):
a firm with highly compensated, high performing talent.
Speaker 2 (02:22):
The people at Jane.
Speaker 3 (02:23):
Street are often described as mathematical.
Speaker 2 (02:27):
A lot of them play.
Speaker 3 (02:29):
Poker, They have puzzles in their offices. They're problem solvers
in the most advanced way.
Speaker 1 (02:37):
And those puzzle playing problem solvers spend their days helping
institutions and other investors make trades.
Speaker 2 (02:44):
Essentially their matching a buyer and a seller. You think
that when you place an.
Speaker 1 (02:50):
Order, it's as if you go to the grocery store.
Speaker 2 (02:53):
And you're buying something.
Speaker 3 (02:54):
Well, in the markets, there needs to be someone that
actually helps make that match happen.
Speaker 2 (03:00):
Bayne Street is that firm.
Speaker 1 (03:02):
They're the middleman for all sorts of transactions. If you
buy stock in a company through a trading app, or
if you ask a broker to invest your money, Jane
Street might be the firm behind the curtain helping move
that money around. Or you might be interacting with one
of its competitors.
Speaker 3 (03:19):
And you don't know if it was Jane Street or
if it was Citadel Securities or Susquehanna. There's so many
of these market making firms, and frankly, until the Meme
stock craze, retail traders didn't seem to care, or at
least there wasn't as much discussion.
Speaker 1 (03:37):
Jane Street is a private company and not a bank.
While it has to abide by market rules, it isn't
subject to the same degree of regulation that big banks
such as JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs have faced since
the two thousand and eight financial crisis. Those other financial
institutions are under pressure to avoid risk taking, and that
gives Jane Street an edge.
Speaker 3 (03:58):
They can invest in their technology in the way that
banks can't because banks have to.
Speaker 2 (04:04):
Be a little bit more conservative with their own money.
Speaker 3 (04:07):
And the secret sauce is that they're able to code
in the special language as well.
Speaker 2 (04:16):
And what that means is it.
Speaker 3 (04:17):
Is hard for other firms to copy exactly what Jane
Street is doing, and they're able to take really big
bets in the market. They're not in the game to
necessarily invest in a company because they think that the
company's earnings are going to increase over time, or they're
(04:40):
not looking to invest in even a sector because they
believe in that sector. Their primary goal is to just
be greasing the pipes of the market.
Speaker 1 (04:51):
They're not just using elbow grease. They're using powerful technology
to guide their traits. If they can anticipate how markets
are moving from one second to the next, they can
offer the right prices and profit.
Speaker 3 (05:04):
So they've developed algorithms. They're using data and they're digesting
that data to make inferences. They're guessing where the market's.
Speaker 2 (05:15):
Going to be moving.
Speaker 3 (05:16):
So if they, for example, see a share, maybe.
Speaker 2 (05:20):
It's a share of Apple, and there's a buyer.
Speaker 3 (05:23):
In the market that is looking to buy at a
certain price, and there's a seller in the market, their
algorithm is telling them to match at a certain time
at a certain price, and it is in milliseconds, So
this is very very fast. And they're doing this with
so many shares that the way that they make money
is they're taking a tiny profit the difference between where
(05:48):
the share is sold and where the share is bought,
and they're pocketing that. And it might be pennies. You
might think, oh, this company that makes twenty billion dollars
in a year, how did they do that? It adds
up over time, and because they're using their algorithms, their technology,
their people, over time, they make billions of dollars.
Speaker 1 (06:07):
So it's a volume game and it's a speed game. Yes,
a volume and speed game known as high frequency trading. Still,
there's a lot about the firm we don't know, and
that sense of secrecy is deeply embedded in the company's culture,
its offices, even hung a poster, but the famous World
War Two slogan loose lips sink ships.
Speaker 3 (06:32):
You don't see a lot of Jane Street executives in
the public eye. They're not ever really on TV or
even in really niche financial conferences if you go on LinkedIn.
Speaker 2 (06:45):
At one time.
Speaker 3 (06:46):
Profiles were discouraged, and now if you do see a profile,
there's often not a title attached to a person's name,
and that is reflective of how this firm operates in
terms of its culture and the times that it has
been brought into the public eye.
Speaker 2 (07:07):
It's probably something they would not want.
Speaker 1 (07:10):
One of those moments came with the collapse of FTX,
the multi billion dollar crypto company that had been founded
by a former Jane Street employee, Sam Bankman freed.
Speaker 3 (07:20):
When FTX collapsed, there was a lot of discussion about
the risk taking that Sam's firm took and some comparisons
to Jane Street.
Speaker 1 (07:32):
But Jane Street hasn't been the target of any major
regulatory investigations itself until now. Earlier this month, India's regulator,
the Securities in Exchange Board or SEBI, started investigating the
firm for market manipulation. Why did regulators start circling. Do
we know what made them want to investigate Jane Street
(07:55):
in India.
Speaker 3 (07:56):
So it all stems back to a lawsuit the firm
had with former employees that went to the hedge fund
Millennium and they were suing these former employees for We
didn't know it at the time, but it ended up
being identified as an options trading strategy. They identified what
they didn't want to lose as proprietary information. Through this case,
(08:22):
the number the profit that they were making in options
specifically and in India came out. It was such a
large number that the regulators in India said, hold on
a second.
Speaker 2 (08:38):
We have to look into this.
Speaker 1 (08:41):
We get into what those regulators found and what it
could mean for the way firms like Jane Street operate
around the world. After the break in the past few years,
Street and other market making firms saw an opportunity to
(09:03):
expand their presence in Indian markets. Over the past five years,
India's options market has boomed along with the number of
retail traders. That growth has also led to more volatility
and a higher potential for profit, and for Jane Street,
that paid off. The firm made more than four billion
dollars in India in just over two years. Meanwhile, regulators
(09:26):
in India said nine out of ten individual traders who
bet on futures and options lost a significant amount of
money doing so, and that's part of what got regulators
looking at how these firms were operating. Bloomberg's Catherine Doherty
walked me through what happened.
Speaker 3 (09:42):
You have the options market and you have the equity market.
They're directly correlated.
Speaker 1 (09:47):
The equities market is where you buy or sell stocks.
The options market is where you buy the option to
buy or sell stocks at a certain price at a
future date. The key is betting on which direction the
stock price might go, something that's influenced by activity in
the equities market.
Speaker 3 (10:06):
The regulator in India, the Security Is and Exchange Board,
is accusing the firm of manipulating the market, using its
money to place such large bets on one market that
it moves the other market in a way that the
firm knows they're going to profit from it. The firm
(10:27):
has said that this is the term arbitrage. Arbitrage is
just when you spot a dislocation or you can see
that the market is inefficient in a way that you
can profit from that and you can. Essentially, what the
firm would argue is we were actually making the marketplace better,
we were making it more efficient. So yes, it might
(10:47):
have moved, but it was moving in some ways closer
to where it should.
Speaker 1 (10:52):
Basically, the regulator is accusing Jane Street of playing both
sides of these markets and alleging that the firm was
putting so much much money on one market that i
was impacting the other. The regulator ordered the seizure of
about five hundred and seventy million dollars in profits from
the firm, which it claims were unlawful gains. It also
temporarily banmed Jane Street from trading in the Indian securities
(11:16):
market while it conducts its investigation. I mean, the Indian
options market is pretty unique. What could this order mean
for Jane Streets or other similar market making firms operations
elsewhere around the world.
Speaker 3 (11:29):
First and foremost, there's nothing stopping a regulator from looking
into a firm that they regulate.
Speaker 2 (11:36):
That's their job. So anytime a firm.
Speaker 3 (11:40):
Is in the news like Jane Street, there's increased scrutiny.
Speaker 1 (11:45):
Doesn't mean that other regulators from other countries where Jane
Street operates might be wanting to turn over more stones.
Speaker 2 (11:52):
Yes.
Speaker 3 (11:52):
I talked to someone that said, regulators don't want to
be asleep at the wheel. So even if it's just precautionary,
it's very likely that a regulator might take a second
look at what they have access to, and if they
don't have access or they have more questions, they might
ask Jane Street to answer those questions just so they
(12:13):
have some reassurance that there's nothing that they see as
potentially nefarious or manipulative. And it goes the same for
a peer of James. I've talked to other market participants
that would be competitors to Jane, other market makers, and
one firm said that right after this order came out,
(12:34):
they were digging through the order and they also had
an internal meeting amongst themselves to say, hey, are we
doing anything that might not be exactly the same as
what Jane Street was doing, but let's look through our
trading strategies to make sure there's nothing that comes across
as questionable or that could be brought up by regulators
as nefarious. And this person was quick to say, like,
(12:58):
we didn't come to that conclusion, but you have to
be proactive.
Speaker 1 (13:04):
Jane Street has set aside nearly five hundred and seventy
million dollars in an escrow account to comply with SEBI's
order while it investigates. A person familiar with the matter
told Bloomberg that the firm doesn't plan to immediately return
to India's options market for now. Market watchers will wait
to see what the regulator's investigation turns up and whether
(13:24):
Jane Street decides to file an appeal. What could this
scrutiny of Jane Street mean for the entire high frequency
trading market making industry.
Speaker 3 (13:37):
It's a really important question, and it depends who you
ask people in the industry. Even when I asked that
question just about Jane Street's future, I had a quick
answer from someone that said, they're so.
Speaker 2 (13:51):
Large and they're so.
Speaker 3 (13:53):
Good at what they do that this won't impact the
amount of trading that they're still able to facilitate, and
that they're just going to keep doing what they do
because they have such an important role across global markets.
Speaker 1 (14:10):
This is the Big Take from Bloomberg News. I'm Sarah Holder.
To get more from the Big Take and unlimited access
to all of Bloomberg dot com, subscribe today at bloomberg
dot com slash podcast offer. If you liked this episode,
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(14:30):
Thanks for listening. We'll be back tomorrow