This wasn’t an ETF liquidity story,” says Matt Berger, head of bond trading at Jane Street. “It was liquidity drying up in the underlying fixed income markets.” Equity ETFs are often supported by a plethora of market-makers and APs, but bond ETFs are more specialised, with a narrower club dominating activity. Some analysts and investors have long fretted what would happen if an accident were to befall one of the bigger players. “If you think the fixed income ETF market is systemically important, then Jane Street is systemically important,” says the one-time rival. That extra confidence paid off handsomely when markets were thrown into a tailspin last March, and bond ETFs emerged as a major faultline. Some sceptics argue that only the Federal Reserve’s extraordinary stimulus prevented a disaster for fixed income ETFs, and remain convinced that they could still prove fragile.

They obviously have a lot of smart technologists, but in their DNA they are really traders,” says a one-time rival. “Many market-makers are very technology-driven, but Jane Street is a trader-driven firm. Jane’s niche is that they will price less liquid ETFs better than anyone.” Jane Street’s unorthodoxy goes well beyond its programming language. Mr Granieri is the only remaining founder still at the company, but there is no chief executive, hierarchy or even a clear management committee. Instead, Jane Street almost resembles an anarchist commune, informally led by a group of 30 or 40 senior executives. A smattering of titles have been reluctantly adopted in recent years, but internally they are little used and people rotate around the firm to keep things fresh. Few leave. The revised 22nd edition contains 239 quantitative questions collected from actual job interviews in investment banking, investment management, and options trading. The interviewers use the same questions year-after-year, and here they are with detailed solutions! This edition also includes 264 non-quantitative actual interview questions, giving a total of more than 500 actual finance job interview questions.For an industry that often cultivates cinematic genesis stories, the opacity around Jane Street’s birth, ownership and even management is unusual. In practice, many bond ETFs traded almost like traditional closed-end funds, the Bank of Canada concluded in a postmortem published in December.

Jane Street is this big, important and growing player that no one’s really heard of,” says Steve Zamsky, previously head of corporate credit trading at Morgan Stanley and now a fund manager at Smith Capital. “They’re sophisticated, quirky and not typical of Wall Street traders.” It’s that time of year again: alternate-side winter parking regulations begin Nov. 15. The object is to have residents park in a way that allows the Department of Public Works to clear each side of the street from snow and slush during winter. The regulation calls for all cars to be parked on the correct side of the street from midnight to 5 p.m. as indicated by building numbers in relation to the calendar days. For example, odd-numbered calendar days call for parking on odd sides of the street and even-numbered calendar days call for parking on even numbered sides of the street. The transition period to move your vehicle is from 5 p.m. to 11:59 p.m. No parking is allowed downtown from 1 a.m. through 6:59 a.m. If an ETF trades above the value of its assets, APs buy the underlying securities that match the ETF and use them to create new shares to sell to investors. When ETFs fall below the value of their assets, they instead redeem shares for a proportional slice of the underlying portfolio and then sell them. Mostly this continuous arbitrage doesn’t actually require the ETF itself to buy or sell anything and keeps it trading in line with its index.

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However, a fire sale by investors desperate to raise cash hit bond trading in March. That meant APs struggled to narrow the widening dislocations between the fast-sliding prices of bond ETFs and the lagging value of their assets, simply because they had trouble selling the underlying bonds.