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518 points bwfan123 | 2 comments | | HN request time: 0.431s | source
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cs702 ◴[] No.44483909[source]
According to Indian regulators, every trading day Jane Street would:

1) buy large volumes of stocks and/or stock futures that are part of an index tracking India’s banking sector, early in the day,

2) subsequently place large options trades, betting that the index would decline or volatility would spike later in the day, and

3) later in the day, cash out of the large long positions, dragging the index lower, making far more money on the options trades than on the long positions.

Jane Street can and likely will claim the firm was only arbitraging away pricing inefficiencies, nothing more, nothing less. It was just business as usual, etc., etc.

However, given the scale of the operation, Jane Street's actions sure look like textbook market manipulation. Calling it like I see it.

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Workaccount2 ◴[] No.44486444[source]
And this is what some of the brightest minds in the country are being harvested to develop. One of the biggest ongoing travesties.
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thierrydamiba ◴[] No.44486970[source]
Cash rules everything around me has been the slogan for this generation. Why wouldn’t they chase the biggest dollar?
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1. UncleMeat ◴[] No.44489761[source]
The criticism is largely of the system. The mechanism by which capitalism can improve society is by having pay be a incentive to create things that improve society, which people will then choose to purchase.

When the incentive instead rewards "how much money can you extract from others without improving their lives at all" we've headed in a very dangerous direction. You get the "we can make more money by making our product more aggravating" motivation that leads to dark patterns and all sorts of problems.

This sort of market manipulation stuff is just a very clear example of this pattern. Smart people not building useful products but instead fighting to crank a machine so that it spits more money in their direction.

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2. mistrial9 ◴[] No.44489834[source]
> Smart people not building useful products

worse, those are the active smart people doing that.. for each one of them there are a hundred others trying to do everything and anything to become one of those.. its a pyramid. The competition between individuals is a feature. You bet it is on the lips of every one of those individuals their "top" credentials that sit them in that trading seat. In other words, for every quant geek on that trading group, there are a thousand other "almost top" people using their time, talent and effort to try to be one of those inner circle ones.