>>The social justice / millenial part of me hates this for being funded by high frequency trading, of all things. What a colossal waste of resources.

HFT makes the market more efficient, just like the AI eliminating jobs makes business more efficient. It's been numbing watching HN gladly sacrifice it's own to the altar of AI over and over. There is no moral high ground.

Personally as a retail quant, it's really rewarding to build models that extract edge from the market using the very AI tools that have eliminated all hope of ever re-entering the tech-field absent being an entrepreneurial founder.

>>The social justice / millenial part of me hates this for being funded by high frequency trading, of all things. What a colossal waste of resources.

It's more efficient now than it used to be - by which I mean the total taken by HFTs is lower than what people used to pay in spreads and commisions. Price discovery is better (you get closer to a fair price if you trade) and spreads are lower. The whole industry that used to prey on spreads and ignorance of retail investors is gone. What not to like about HFT?

There is an open source silicon community built around multi-project wafer shuttles that has nothing to do with HFT.

Western societies in which HFT happens also happen to have the best medicine, leisure (many different sports for example), education etc.

You think you could do better by having a planned economy, with your eminence deciding what's a waste and what is not? And why should I believe you it'd end up differently than North Korea or Cuba?

Or you'd somehow manage to take what you think are all the good parts of western societies while outlawing what's wasteful and we'd have an utopia?

I don’t think Jane Street does high frequency trading. I think you might be thinking of Citadel or HRT. Jane Street is more of an old-school quant hedge fund, no?