[nv-vn]

>Jane Street has spent decades developing their own trading models and machine learning solutions to identify profitable opportunities and quickly decide whether to execute trades. These models help Jane Street trade thousands of financial products each day across 200 trading venues around the world.

>Admittedly, this challenge far oversimplifies the depth of the quantitative problems Jane Streeters work on daily, and Jane Street is happy with the performance of its existing trading model for this particular question. However, there’s nothing like a good puzzle, and this challenge will hopefully serve as a fun introduction to a type of data science problem that a Jane Streeter might tackle on a daily basis.

Sounds like it's just for fun/recruiting rather than trying to crowd source new strategies -- I'm sure if they were looking to crowd source strats they'd pay a whole lot more than 40k for first place

[tcbawo]

This contest seems like the equivalent of the "inventor's hotline" infomercial. If it identifies one promising new approach that they can iterate on, it has probably paid for itself. It also serves as a good PR and recruiting tool. The prize is probably designed to bring in clever non-professionals. It's a win-win for Jane Street

[elil17]

The inventors hotline infomercial is a scam where they get you to pay for expensive patent filing, consulting, and marketing packages. They never intend to actually use any of the inventions.

[Traster]

If someone has a good idea, you don't want the idea, you want the person. If you take the idea, at best you'll split the market with the person who had the idea. At worst they'll iterate and you'll get nothing. Far better to find people who have the skills to develop an idea.

Having said that you also want to find the (vastly more in number) people who can take someone else's idea and actually implement it.

[amznthrwaway]

I sincerely doubt they think they'll get actionable ideas. It seems like a fun recruiting play from a company that takes pride in hiring non-traditional talent.

[b20000]

why would they need to pay more? the nature of smart people is to undervalue themselves and to not negotiate, so as long as smart people keep doing that other people can take advantage of that.

[nv-vn]

Because they would hire the person in hopes of new ideas.