alt Hacker NewsJane Street suffers $15B hit after meltdown at Situational Awareness
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Original headline is "Jane Street suffers $15bn loss in July market ructions".
HN guidelines do request use of original title and in this specific case the change of title is misleading by implying that situational awareness directly caused losses at JS.
In the text it says "the US trading firm was wrongfooted during last month’s market ructions including the meltdown at AI-focused hedge fund Situational Awareness" so while SA is mentioned the implications of a direct link to the losses is less strong.
edit: more detail in https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/jane-street-took-15... confirms some losses linked directly to SA and some losses to their own positions.
Archive link (https://archive.is/20260814213548/https://www.ft.com/content...)
Pretty short so I imagine more details and analysis are forthcoming.
Seems like it was banned, at least temporarily from trading in India: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c5y0zgrevl1o
They're still up $25B for the year, so it's hard to feel bad for them :-)
On a more serious note, Jane Street has hired some very impressive technical talent. I'd work for them, myself, if I didn't have to relocate to Chicago.
Ever since the infamous work of some of their alumni I have wondered what the culture of JS is actually like.
“By our calculations, Jane Street ponied up a one-off $200mn to do the deal and then locked in a further $200mn of costs per annum, at least in part, to avoid us gawping at their numbers every quarter. Wowsers” [1].
[1] https://www.ft.com/content/28a51284-98cc-4767-a306-0540d2656...
If SA's losses were around $30B does that mean Jane Street owned half?
It's all so sketchy. Jane Street were investors in SA but presumably were much more sophisticated and savvy than Leopold. When SA got in trouble, 3 firms got into a bid war for the assets at fire sale prices: Citadel, Jane Street and a third I forgot. Citadel outbid the other 2, but it's all weird, like Jane Street wanted in on the popular boy's book that they knew was going to tank and just were waiting around in the water like sharks.
The bigger hit will be all their star quants going full solo (supervised with Claude).
Fuck, ocaml's never getting row polymorphism now, my day is ruined.
They were not fully aware of the situation, it seems.
...
I'll see myself out.
[dead]
Jane Street doesn't care about this loss. But it is almost always the effective altruists accelerating their own downfall.
And yes, Anthropic included.
And they're still making tens of billions this year. Whatever they're paying in taxes, it isn't enough.
Who the heck is Jane Street? Oh, I see, they're a "quantitative trading firm", whatever that means.
The real headline is buried in the article:
> Jane Street has generated more than $40bn in net trading revenues in the year to Friday, even accounting for the July loss, which exceeds its entire haul for 2025, according to one of the people familiar with the matter.
This would make JS one of the most profitable trading firms of all time even with the loss.