- Sometimes, it’s not clear why a strategy worked
- Still, short of a clear reason we’ll re-run our screen
In Going Infinite, his new book on the meteoric rise and very painful fall of Sam Bankman-Fried, writer Michael Lewis dedicates a chapter to the FTX founder's time as a trader at Jane Street Capital.
A few details about this early career stop jump out, including a hiring approach that prefers maths whizzes to Wall Street archetypes, and the firm’s emphasis on technology and quantitative-led strategies. As Lewis puts it, these strategies often amounted to “looking for weighted coins to flip”, or small inefficiencies in markets that could be indefinitely exploited for huge, repeatable profits.