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Caml Trading

Caml Trading on HackerTube: recommended by 1 Hacker News commenter across 1 month, 2013–2018.

Yaron Minsky

talk · intermediate · evergreen

Open on YouTube

Yaron Minsky explains how Jane Street moved from mainstream languages to developing almost entirely in OCaml. He covers trading systems, research infrastructure, tooling and hiring.

Why Hacker News recommends it

Cited as evidence for OCaml's readability benefits and for hiring in less popular languages.

people recommended it
1
separate months
1
strong recommendations
0
discussed on HN
2013–2018
“People who are nervous about hiring people in a relatively unpopular language should watch this video[1]”
— gnuvince, Sep 2013, in “Where my mouth is”

What HN commenters said

6 Hacker News comments link this video. Each one links back to its thread.

gnuvinceSep 2013Recommends

People who are nervous about hiring people in a relatively unpopular language should watch this video[1] at the 1:01.00 mark by Yaron Minsky. [1] ▶ this video

in “Where my mouth is” · View on HN

bufferoverflowFeb 2018Cites it

That's just not true. There are whole companies based on algorithmic trading. Jane Street, for instance, has a tech talk on how they take advantage of Caml in automated trading. ▶ this video

in “A.I. Has Arrived in Investing, Humans Are Still Dominating” · View on HN

imaginenoreDec 2016Cites it

You most certainly can, just not with such naïve approach. Jane Street is a company that does it, and they are quite open about their tech approach (just not about their specific models): ▶ this video Jane Street went from zero to trading $1 trillion in volume in just 15 years.

in “LSTM Neural Networks for Time Series Prediction” · View on HN

hoggleJun 2014Cites it

Jane Street is one of the few companies which are betting heavily on OCaml, it makes sense to go all functional in the high frequency trading world I guess. It's purportedly been C/C++ for most of that industry, probably not the best toolset for keeping error rates low in a complex environment. Fascinating to read how far beyond language decisions they need to think to shield themselves against outages (and competitors?). I did a little bit of experimentation with OCaml by playing with bitcoin exchange APIs during the China boom some months ago, but I unfortunately didn't push further to a point where I'd be using Jane Street's open source libraries. It still was very interesting and IMHO totally worth it if not just for the functional programming practice. Relevant video on how OCaml gets used at Jane Street: ▶ this video

in “Reading Lamport, again ” · View on HN

wtetznerSep 2013Cites it

Jane Street Capital uses OCaml for their trading system. Yaron Minsky explained that one of the main benefits of it was that people could read and understand the code much better than the other languages they tried (including C#). Yaron's talk: ▶ this video

in “Clojure for the Brave and True – Functional Programming” · View on HN

kylebrownJan 2013Cites it

> We (I work for Quantopian) will surely support other order types when we support live trading. I suspect they won't be true limit orders, but stop orders (true limit orders wouldn't slip). Also, for a passive trading algorithm its important to have level II data (the order book), or the algorithm is flying blind. Re 1, its not the size of the data set which prevents overfitting (larger data sets actually make it more likely), but the use of it when developing/training the algorithm. Repeated testing and tweaking the algorithm will overfit, unless one is careful to maintain the complexity of the algorithm. Anyway, best of luck to your users! But they should be warned that active trading on signals (price prediction) is the hard way to algorithmic profit. That's why market making and arbitrage is the bread and butter of the pros, not signal trading.[1] 1. said as much here somewhere in the first 20:00 ▶ this video

in “Quantopian Brings Algorithmic Trading To The Masses” · View on HN

Topics & tags

Functional programmingTech industry & business modelsocamljane streetfunctional programmingtrading systemshiring