NSAV Holding Inc (NSAV)

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JANUARY 28 2021

A year ago, the world seemed oblivious to signs that a novel virus outbreak in China was a serious, global threat. But one of Wall Street’s biggest but most secretive money machines saw the debacle coming and battened down the hatches.

Jane Street may be little known outside its community — and even there mostly famous for its cultish dedication to a recondite programming language called OCaml. But the company has become one of the world’s largest market-makers, trading more than $17tn worth of securities in 2020.

Its forte is lubricating trading in exchange traded funds, which manage nearly $8tn of assets according to data provider ETFGI. Jane Street is especially dominant in the niche but rapidly growing world of bond ETFs. That prowess has allowed it to reach a beachhead in corporate bond trading, where it is now going toe-to-toe with some of Wall Street’s most pedigreed businesses.


“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.”


Culturally, Jane Street has also always been a little paranoid, with executives constantly fretting about the risks of improbable but catastrophic crashes. Even beyond every trading desk’s routine hedging of positions, Jane Street at a company level spends $50m-$75m a year on put options — derivatives that pay out if markets slump. In early February, the firm aggressively ramped this up to ensure it could still confidently keep trading even if turmoil hits the markets.