This week Jane Street Capital a global proprietary trading firm has announced it has been trading BTC these days. Often referred to as one of Wall Street’s most secretive investment companies, Jane Street says if cryptocurrencies continue to rise they expect to be involved.
The ‘Secretive’ and High-Tech Trading Firm Jane Street is Flipping Bitcoins
The trading firm Jane Street operated in New York City, London and Hong Kong and the company actively trades $8-13 billion worth of equities, Bonds, Futures, Options, and other investments. Jane Street claims to execute over 1Mn trades per day. The New York Times has referred to Jane Street as one of the most secretive firms out there that handles a lot of trade volume. The news outlet called the traders “coders with a Ph.D.” and the firm specializes in lots of arbitrage trades. According to Business Insider, the firm has explained it is now dabbling in BTC trading.
Arbitrage opportunities in the world of cryptocurrencies and bitcoin are very tempting to firms like Jane Street because spreads can be very high on different trading platforms. Global BTC exchanges can have as much as 10 percent in arbitrage opportunities between each trading venue. Jane Street has not given any details on how it has been trading BTC but explains that if cryptos continue to be hot, the company will continue to remain active.
“Jane Street trades over 56,000 products globally across a wide variety of asset classes, including bitcoin,” the company explains this week.
Jane Street has always taken a considered approach to trading opportunities and will continue to do so, as more cryptocurrency products emerge, we expect to be involved.
Jane Street Follows Other Well Known Wall Street Market Makers
The news also follows other big-name Wall Street firms who have been reportedly trading bitcoin or crypto-based exchange-traded notes and futures products. This year at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Goldman Sachs Lloyd Blankfein explained if clients want to trade BTC they will help facilitate. “We’re clearing futures in bitcoins for some of our futures clients — We’d clear them,” explains Blankfein. “We’re a prime broker, and so if our clients are going to do it, we’re going to do it.”
Back in September of 2017, Jamie Dimon explained that bitcoin traders were “stupid.” But the firm was caught red-handed trading BTC exchange-traded notes for clients. Further, the company has stated it is open to offering clients CME and Cboe bitcoin futures.
Jane Street is different than JP Morgan and Goldman as it uses the Ocaml programming language that helps the firm’s traders quickly execute trades in changing market conditions. The company has even released some open source code for its Ocaml libraries. Jane Street did not reveal to the press how it was actively trading cryptocurrencies.