Jane street suing MLP
Jane Street Group sued Millennium Management and two former traders over their alleged theft of a highly confidential and “immensely valuable” proprietary trading strategy.
In a complaint filed Friday in federal court in Manhattan, Jane Street said former traders Douglas Schadewald and Daniel Spottiswood, who resigned earlier this year to join Millennium, had been “intimately involved” in the development of the strategy. According to the suit, they are now using it at Izzy Englander’s hedge fund group in violation of confidentiality agreements.
The complaint is interesting - much of it redacted. Anyone have color on what they were trading? Complaint explicitly says it wasn't related to previous experience in VIX and SPX vol
Very interesting. Hope someone can spill the tea
Yeah, crazy. My connects at the tiptop prop shops are saying the two of them were developing an insane VIX trading algo at JS based on # of BBL surgeries done per day and then Englander (notorious for having >3 bbl’s done) poached when he heard the news in the the HF GroupMe. Will keep you guys posted.
this is just cringe, would delete
Hardest thing to understand is seemingly the guy quit one day and joined a competitor the next day.
If this guy was so involved in developing a huge strategy, how did Jane St not have him on a 2-3 year non-compete?
Maybe they did and it just wasn't enforceable somehow? Or he's just making so much money + MLP is paying for the lawyers so neither he nor MLP cares what Jane Street does.
My guess is that's exactly what this lawsuit is about -- they guy probably *does* have a 2 year non-compete but ignored it to go to a competitor anyway and that's why they're now suing him. All the accusations about "stealing a trading strategy" are just window dressing for Jane Street to emphasize to the judge why they want the non-compete enforced.
The full complaint is public (with minor redactions) and there is no mention of a non-compete clause in his contract. I'm perplexed that Jane St just took his word rather than pre-emptively including a strong non-compete when he originally joined them.
I and many on this site are bound by multi-month non-competes even though the IP we generate is worthless compared to what this dude had in his hands. Jane St hired this guy in 2018 and "forgot" to include a non-compete? Sounds like negligence.
Can confirm. No need to do any research into related strategies guys. Nothing to see here guys, carry on.
Will be interesting to see two big firms fight it out this time.
And of course it happens all the time. Why do you think people (traders/Pm) move to other firms? To develop new things from scratch?
After going through the case file, seems like it is volatility related with both defendants working on option desk at JS and one guy in charge of executing with intra-day signals but it is clearly not simply spx option, vix future etc. My best guess could be some other niche vol products.
can someone link the complaint please
Link: https://assets.bwbx.io/documents/users/iqjWHBFdfxIU/rEXVjFfBUnn4/v0
read through the complaint as well. is it just me or does it seem like JS doesn't really have a case?
I think it’s obvious they took some IP but hard to prove
Exactly what i was thinking. Ppl leave to use knowledge they've gleaned from former employers to compete all the time. I don't think there's a case unless it's proven they took code with them, which i can't think they'd be stupid enough to do.
It's interesting because most of the HFT arbs run by these shops are mostly technology and infrastructure advantages that can't be easily replicated at a new shop. JS famously doesn't even have non competes because they believe that other places won't have the built in infra to replicate their strategies. I'm at a similar shop and think about hopping to a MM, but realistically I don't see how I could replicate any of the strategies I'm running by myself in a new environment.
Just speculating here, but the fact that they were able to replicate the strategy in weeks at Millennium might point to less of a general HFT strat but an inefficiency with a certain data provider /exchange that gave them an information advantage. There has been instances of certain crypto exchanges misquoting prices or other inefficiencies that large prop firms stayed away from because the market opportunity was too small or due to regulatory risk, that was exploitable quit easily if you knew about it. Maybe this was something along that lines.
Perfect example of the latter is the semi famous FTX leveraged product rebalance strategy.
I'm also at a similar firm, but I don't buy that. Sure, a startup HF would need several years to build up the infra needed to run your strategy; but established firms like Citadel, Millennium, Hudson River, PDT, RenTech, Point72, etc will all already have similar infra -- maybe better in some ways, worse in others, but similar enough you'd recognize it. It'd take you some time to recreate your strategy on the new system (like you said, even if you took the code with you, you couldn't just run it as-is) but if you know "these are the five key insights that drove most of our PNL last year" then you could be profitable at a new shop in the first year.
I'm at one of those firms you listed, and maybe because I'm still relatively junior, but talking informally with people at MM the infra sounds a lot worse. Millenium from my informal discussions sounds like every pod is for themselves and they basically have to rebuild infra for each pod.
Even if infra is similar, replicating a strategy in just weeks is insane. This probably means a level of premeditation where they were actively rebuilding the strategy on the side during their time at JS.
Would this type of stuff affect your future employment prospects? Would firms be less willing to hire you because they're worried about their trade secrets?
Quite the opposite I think
Getting sued for making too much money and cutting into the competition's profits is the only surefire way to get an inbound call from Kenny and Dmitry.
My buddy was re hired by his former boss (named in the suit) and started at MLP about a month ago.
He's not shared any info (with very good reason) on what the strat is or what's happened so far. JS doesn't have non-competes but you do sign an NDA.
If this doesn't work out for him then he's back to enjoying early retirement it seems
Anyone has color what type of strategy/asset class this is related to?
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-04-19/jane-street-s-secret…
Matt Levine provided a good summary in today's newsletter. Jane Street doesn't have a case IMO.
Hm I didn't think Matt Levine's article made such a judgement. MLP was sued years ago by Rentec along very similar lines and they settled and fired the traders..
Bloomberg reported that the strategy was in the India options market and made $1bn in PnL for Jane St last year, their most profitable strategy
Dang. I was wondering how they made all of those billions in a tough year for the Asian market.
Looks like strategy is related to options trading in India. No wonder JS was hiring India option trader actively. With the huge volume trading on NIFTY options, looks possible for scalable strategy.
Lol probably they were front-running some Indian billionaires trading Nifty and SPX options. The Indian market is def less transparent compared to the US cause their fund management compliance rule isn't as strict as SEC's
.
Would love to know how much MLP is paying Schadewald...comp was redacted in the complaint. Life goal is to have my comp redacted in a complaint one day.
Official complaint filed against “Anonymous Analyst 1 in PE” for refusing to share his annualized compensation of .
There ya go! Bucket list item checked off.
Heard through the grapevine that Doug Schadewald fled to Switzerland. Does anyone here know why?
Probably because he enjoys the beautiful scenery.
Doesn't sound like "fleeing" ...sounds like trading India from closer time zones and/or optimizing taxes.
You can't optimize taxes by moving to Europe as an American citizen...
JS does not have non-competes (100% confident this is true as strange as that might sound). If you're wondering why JS doesn't have non-competes despite that it seems obvious to do here it's because of the unique culture of the firm.
(1) When Doug started he traded index options via a low tech strategy that involved literally placing orders on the phone. I know this can sound surprising because when people think Jane Street they think "quant geniuses doing computer stuff" but you'd be surprised if you knew how low tech the firm was in a lot of areas. When he was hired he didn't do this India strategy.
(2) Jane Street tries new strategies literally all the time. Doug became a partner for another totally unrelated strategy that he got lucky on. The India strategy was new and from the last few years. In other words, the fact that this India strategy was highly profitable wasn't something Jane Street knew when they hired Doug. It's also super common there that people try a lot of different things and adapt to changing market conditions with new strategies.
(3) Jane Street historically has never had non-competes for a cultural reason. They want to be able to say that people don't leave because it's a good place to work. In reality, it's because they do a great job with company culture and getting people out of college who will just never want to leave and, if they leave, it is to retire young. Doug is unique because he didn't join after college, but was an experienced hire, so perhaps this sort of cultural reason to not leave didn't work on him. Also, it you physically interact with him versus any other Jane Street employee it will be obvious why he is not a classic culture fit. He is a tall jacked dude in a sea of nerds.
Why then are they suing? Jane Street suing someone is utterly unprecedented. My guess is two reasons:
(1) The India strategy was new. The options team at JS historically never made much money, despite that they have at least a few of the smartest people at the firm. If the India strategy made a lot that makes it stand out as unique and probably at the time was a bit of a crown jewel for that team. I am guessing this is why they are suing.
(2) Doug leaving with the strategy would likely seem extremely unfair to people there. It's not "his" strategy. The firm has a really collaborative culture and probably the idea was heavily inspired by the work of other people and he just executed on it and did a bit of work on it. Particularly given that this is one of the few options strategies that seems to have actually worked at the firm this likely really pissed people there off.
(3) Most financial firms are literally so uncreative. Jane Street is uniquely very creative in how they approach things relative to other financial market participants. And when people leave it's historically almost never been to join another large trading firm. Instead, it's been to start your own trading firm. As far as I'm aware, this is the first time in the firm's history where someone left to join another large firm, which risks massive IP leakage. There's a lot of leakage of firm IP that can result from this and likely they want to send a message to existing employees that this is a dumb move so don't do this. (This is easier to do given their culture than retroactively enforce non-competes on all existing employees.)
The better question is why Doug would ever choose to leave Jane Street to join another firm rather than, say, start his own firm. This doesn't make much sense and has never happened to the firm before. He was a partner there which meant he had the privilege of investing his own money with the firm, which is essentially equivalent of investing your money in the Medallion fund or something only a bit worse than giving it to God to invest. My guess is that what happened here is that most JS strategies require a remarkable amount of teamwork to pull off, but perhaps the options strategy Doug was involved with did not require this and so it was easier to replicate himself and hence extract a large portion of the economics. This is actually really unusual for most of their strategies so I am guessing this is what happened here.
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