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> How to admit you're in finance without admitting you're in finance? Tell me you have no clue about quant finance without telling me you have no clue about qu

> How to admit you're in finance without admitting you're in finance? Tell me you have no clue about quant finance without telling me you have no clue about quant finance. You probably think it’s abstract topology and Ito calculus, when in reality it’s linear regression and PCA. If you’re lucky, maybe you’ll see a sigmoid function. If someone in finance is using LLMs, it’s for marketing purposes (recruiting new grads or impressing investors). Jane Street and DE Shaw are notorious for this.

computerfriend 16d ago
This is mostly true, but there are exceptions (e.g. Renaissance Technologies).
- 69nanoseconds 16d ago
  > This is mostly true, but there are exceptions (e.g. Renaissance Technologies). Nope. Let me guess: you listened to The Man Who Solved the Market and think RenTech uses/used unpublished frontier mathematics to predict the market. There are plenty of firms with both higher annual % returns (consistently over 15-20 years) and higher absolute $ returns than RenTech/Medallion fund, especially post-2010. And they’re not using “frontier mathematics”. A lot of alpha comes from how well you know the VP at the exchange. Not math. Not tech. But good ol’ politics. Don’t like a market participant? Tell the exchange to issue violations to that participant. Get them banned for a few months. Fat fingered a trade with wrong price or quantity? The exchange can and does undo a trade after the fact. All in the name of “orderly markets”. Similar to when governments use “national security” as an excuse.
  - computerfriend 16d ago
    > RenTech uses/used unpublished frontier mathematics to predict the market No, more like, some differential geometry and gauge theory. The topics that Jim Simons worked on.
aerodexis 16d ago
I wouldn't be surprised if it's marketing all the way down.

computerfriend 16d ago

This is mostly true, but there are exceptions (e.g. Renaissance Technologies).

69nanoseconds 16d ago
> This is mostly true, but there are exceptions (e.g. Renaissance Technologies). Nope. Let me guess: you listened to The Man Who Solved the Market and think RenTech uses/used unpublished frontier mathematics to predict the market. There are plenty of firms with both higher annual % returns (consistently over 15-20 years) and higher absolute $ returns than RenTech/Medallion fund, especially post-2010. And they’re not using “frontier mathematics”. A lot of alpha comes from how well you know the VP at the exchange. Not math. Not tech. But good ol’ politics. Don’t like a market participant? Tell the exchange to issue violations to that participant. Get them banned for a few months. Fat fingered a trade with wrong price or quantity? The exchange can and does undo a trade after the fact. All in the name of “orderly markets”. Similar to when governments use “national security” as an excuse.
- computerfriend 16d ago
  > RenTech uses/used unpublished frontier mathematics to predict the market No, more like, some differential geometry and gauge theory. The topics that Jim Simons worked on.

aerodexis 16d ago

I wouldn't be surprised if it's marketing all the way down.