Jane Street's Figgie card game
figgie.com
figgie.com
He also wrote an equally brilliant eulogy about Max Chiswick, one of his colleagues, who helped him develop it. https://blog.rossry.net/chisness/
I often see in HN comments about how trading and Wall St in general is evil - when I feel completely the opposite. The two inventors of Figgie may not have contributed directly to curing cancer, saving the dolphins or the whales - dare I posit that most of tech building enterprise JIRA-esque todo-lists, e-commerce middleware and ad trackers don't either.
What I love about their friendship is that I see poker/gambler-mindset of always going for it, shoving the chips to the middle of the table when the pot-odds are good and it is a +EV play. I think they went all-in on several projects such as Figgie, AI Poker and teaching - seemingly all without the whole LinkedIn life coach-advised manner of building up your brand, client-base etc.
The older I get, I find more value too in the honesty of finance and trader types. Yes trading is about money but being honest about that is ironically one of the most altruistic things that can happen for a person. I find that most traders and gamblers who become aware of their greed and selfishness in their work - ironically also causes them to be very generous and selfless people in life due to their constant awareness of that limitation; and to also have zero fox given about what other people think of them professionally and socially (vs. in tech nowadays).
As an options trader/gambler, I'm thankful for the author's eulogy and their efforts in inventing the game. It's a bittersweet story. I read from the eulogy that Max Chiswick embraced the variance of life. Their friendship albeit short and sweet for me is like a fat right tail call option - the holding period might've only been a year and change - but the payoff is one that enriches the soul for life.
Trading is one of the least evil things that goes on on Wall Street. Starting wars for profit (e.g., Blackwater) and buying additional houses as investments (as private equity firms do) and making massive job cuts while posting record profits, are all evil. I loathe capitalism but I agree that quants and traders are some of the least compromised people, whereas “change the world” techies and now techzis are the worst. Traders are, as you said, honest about their motivations.
Ultimately there is no ethical production or consumption in a system as rotten as ours, and everyone has to make a choice. Graveyards are full of moral people, and country clubs are full of humanity’s absolute worst. And if one has children, the argument can be made that failing to provide for them is ethically worse than taking a job within capitalism so long as one isn’t directly harming anyone.
But the evolution from trading x for y to trading x for y governed by z ie introducing fiat currency is the issue.
Lightning trades and trading in general that produces nothing of value is the issue. It goes deeper, with the wealthy able to lobby and keep tax havens legal but I don't expect anything to change so why say anything more on it.
so thats an easy rebuttal to keep in the back pocket
No small number of examples of places with plenty of financiers that have said "aha, we need to have [thing X], let's [throw some money at it]" without much useful results because they don't actually have the necessary people, knowhow, networks, or institutions.
unlocking liquidity of currently hard to value assets will remove distractions for a broader set of people to get education, apply their intellect, and be inspired including to cure. many people are not applying their intellect because they are distracted by their illiquidity, basically all of their life.
> plenty of financiers that have said "aha, we need to have [thing X], let's [throw some money at it]" without much useful results
misallocated capital is a symptom of current market inefficiencies and has nothing to do with the concept of people working in finance versus whatever you prefer
What I'm trying to say is I don't buy the notion of humans "conquering" a disease or the virtue of somehow "elevating" ourselves beyond greed. We are just player-actors in both the beautiful cycle of life-and-death and the madness of crowds participating in markets of life (airbnb rental, dating, job, you name it). To pretend otherwise that somehow we can solve and tame uncertainty is -EV.
"Put that way, I was (and am) convinced that my original post was arguing against a strawman . I had never actually played the kind of poker that would make a fair comparison!"
I was reading about him and his peculiar approach to eating only a couple of months ago.
May his work on poker live on.
My eyes rolled into the back of my head and I was unable to continue reading any more of the article after that
It’s not a particularly old one either, it started showing up a year or two before Covid if I recall right.
The hullabaloo about seed oils showed up roughly 5-6 years ago, has no scientific backing beyond the level that gets you flat earthers and climate change deniers, and is now being touted by people like you as something I must be so confident doesn’t exist that now I have to be the one supplying evidence for the claim.
Add in the normal seed oil enthusiast tropes like Big Pharma and now it’s a conspiracy theory based on nebulous and unproven or actors conspiring against everyone who knows the simple answer of just getting rid of seed oils.
That's literally the point of view that Russell's Teapot is demonstrating as fallacious. There needs to be evidence "for" something before you can argue its validity. Arguing for a statement with no evidence is easy, common, and unfortunately absolutely pointless.
They have no evidence and make active claims. If you want to join their side on that flimsy logic because it sounds mean or you don’t like big pharma then enjoy the company you keep
They all 1)ran student clubs, often time starting their own if they had to, but couldn't care less about the mission or welfare of the group, just so it'd be show leadership skills. They all 2) swore allegiance to Effective Altruism mental without ever volunteering a minute to any worthy cause, most interestingly, 3)interbred only among themselves, possibly because they're too smart to associate with other students.
I find it amazing just how just a few firms on Wall Street seem to fish out all sorts of sociopaths right of ivy league grads. SBF(MIT), R-Yoo brothers (Harvard), happen to have made it to the news so far, but there are new generations coming right behind them - just look for Effective Altruism on their LinkedIn profile. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/24/business/ftx-sbf-modulo-c...
They had all the candidates going around doing various gimmicks like mental arithmetic. But one of the things we had to do was a trading game where you had to get a set of some commodity by trading your cards with other candidates. So just a screaming pit of kids trying to declare what they wanted to swap for.
I got dealt a ridiculously good hand, and all I had to do was wait for a couple of people to give me the missing two or three cards.
Once I started, poker was the game the bosses had us play. It seemed like a 10 quid subsidy from the head trader every day, I just had to wait around until he decided he'd played enough and went all in on what was always a crappy hand.
That essay about why poker probably isn't the best game for traders is pretty good btw. But there was a golden age of online poker going on at the time, and you could sit there with 5 tables open if you wanted.
I like the design of the game, having looked at it superficially. It's basically a market for cards, with what seems like a goal for collecting the right suit.
This is Pit, right? I remember it from an Aaron Brown book. Always wanted to try it!
The basic strategy that works for me:
1. If I have an obvious skew in the distribution of cards I've been dealt, I can assume the common suit and hence the goal suit and try to buy the cards of that suit.
2. If the distribution of cards I have is more or less even, then I just save that round and try to make back the base cost.
The hard part has been trying to understand how to update my beliefs based on the trades being made. If you assume everyone is making the rational choice, you might be able to come up with some strategy, but if its against humans who might be trying to bluff, I have no idea. Although, they say its a win-win game, so maybe theres a way there too.
The updates are in this case, at least assuming others are doing something similar, is to increase expected price if you see sell for higher price and reduce if you see the sell for lower price. To figure out how much to update would be the hard part.
I am fascinated by this app mostly because it has a recruiting message at the bottom from Jane Street. I've never seen that before.
But, it's also interesting because it is one of the more poorly designed apps I've seen. It's react native when you check out the logs using adb. I bet this was a side project from a Jane Street employee. They did their best.
But overall this is a fairly common recruiting tool for firms like this, Jane Street is a definite outlier in how proactive they are but its not out of the norm for these this type of top tier org.
Something is just messed up with it, maybe it's fixed now but 2 weeks ago I tried to build an Expo app and the default template just doesn't build on android. Known issue on GitHub.
Everything is jerryrigged together. Flutter is what RN should of been, but Google doesn't seem to really care about it. Why one company needs multi cross platform frameworks, with multiple languages... I'll never know.
But not about flutter. I just used aider to code a brand new flutter app from scratch. It has Google login. And a webview on a second screen. It looks gorgeous and is performant. And deploying it to my android device from within the aider session worked flawlessly.
Google did a major cut to its flutter team last year. It's a great framework, I've used it for several projects. But I doubt it's future...
Poker solves this with poker tournaments: everyone starts with say $10,000 in play money and plays until one player wins it all. Backgammon solves it with match play: two players play first to say 7 points. In both cases, additional complexity is introduced to the game as optimal strategy changes depending on the size of the bets relative to the players' stacks or the number of points remaining.
Backgammon is just about playable as a one-off without a cube, though not by serious players. A single hand of poker without wagering makes no sense at all. Figgie seems closer to poker than backgammon, based on my reading. But it's being presented as a game to play one-off with bots or strangers. What am I missing?
Obviously it isn't super quick, but once people know whats going on it doesn't take that long either.
Doesn't this make a difference to gameplay? With normal suits, if you trade a few times, you may be able to establish that twelve distinct cards are in a suit even though you never saw more than say four of them at once
Maybe there typically isn't enough trading for this to make a difference? If there is, it does introduce an extra skill to the game of remembering the cards that have been seen before. That's valuable in lots of card games including some poker variants, but it doesn't seem like something JS would emphasize training.
If you have 12 identical decks you can turn them into 13 Figgie decks by combining all the cards of each value.
There are a lot of variations of poker. Playing single hands of, for example, five card draw makes sense without wagering.
Give me one button and throw me into a live game.
Or let me practice against bots before going live.
Also the notice that my username was taken wasn’t clear (was in white) so i thought the app didn’t work until i learned my username was already taken by scrolling up and seeing the notice that didn’t stand out
Hmm. Maybe I can nerd snipe some into making a deck sorter..
You can easily set up the cards with two honest Players. Player 1 sorts and makes four piles S-C--H-D. Player 1 looks away, Player 2 puts 8/12 markers randomly on either the first two piles or the last two piles, then randomizes the piles (so Player 1 gets no information from the order).
The hard part is how to do the trading with real cards. You would have to structure/limit the trading a lot instead of the free-for-all that seems to be going on.
2. Sort them to follow a repeating pattern of 4 distinct suits, e.g. ♥♦♣♠♥♦♣♠♥♦♣♠...
2. Cut the deck, putting the top part under the bottom part
3. (The deck will still have that pattern, but shifted by an unknown amount)
4. Counting out from the top, remove the following cards:
- 1st, 5th, 9th, 13th
- 2nd, 6th
- 3rd, 7th
Or: take 3, skip 1, take 3, skip 1, take 1, skip 3, take 1
Each of these groups will be of the same suit, so the deck should have the figgy distribution.
I guess either works though. For speed you would likely want the players to help either sort by suit or sort by a 4 suit pattern.
Person 2 enters the room, shuffles the boxes, leaves the room.
Person 1 re-enters the room and picks a box.
I guess Person 2 could run some simple validations of what Person 1 initially did.
Then again, Person 2 could have also replaced all of Person 1s decks with their own.
If you can find 4 trades with a 5 point spread profit you'll make the rest of the ante back. That's a full minute for each trade, i.e. not that stressful.
What I do find stressful is how fast the bots react to obvious mispricings. If a player accidentally sells a card worth 8 points for 1 point the bots buy it before I even have a chance to see the offer! I could set a low limit bid on valuable suits to catch that, but the limits reset every time a trade happens, and I do not have the patience to enter the limit again. At least not on my phone -- might be easier on a computer with a real keyboard.
* Start with 1 deck per each 2 players. Shuffle the decks together.
* Deal 10 cards to each player, & set ante at a constant 50 chips per player.
* At the end-of-round reveal, the common suit is whichever suit has the most cards. If there's a tie, flip cards from the remaining deck until the tie is broken and the common suit is determined.
Would be way more fun having some mascots to trade instead of common cards
is this the same game played by FTX sam in that Michael Lewis crypto biopic ??
not saying it was my favorite book but i did enjoy michael lewis’ description of the card game & such
Correct, it’s the first trap us nerds make when corpos make “puzzles” to rope in future engineers to make lose their soul in immoral challenges like finance.
When the FAANG jobs boom fizzles over due to the shift to AI, we will see more engineers compromise to finance as a way to make FAANG level salaries.
We just don’t like to admit it, instead we like nerd games like this.
This is the finance recruitment marketing machine to entice future engineers to lose their soul to make obscene amounts of money doing the most morally bankrupt actions against humanity.
Traders, private equity, hedge funds fall in this bucket.
> Traders, private equity, hedge funds fall in this bucket.
How do you think the money in 401k, pension funds (government, teachers, etc.), S&P500, and any other financial instruments typically relied on by all sorts of average people grow? Do you think they appear out of thin air by the magic will of the market?
Or maybe there is some mechanism through which efficient price discovery happens in a way that benefits both the average people utilizing common investment vehicles and those who actively manage/administer those?
There is a difference between making staggeringly unhealthy amounts of money in days, than making money slowly over decades.
Traders do next to nothing and are able to acquire this relatively quickly and not give anything of value back.
If your idea of placing your money in a pension fund and locking it up for 40 years and only then you are 60+ years old able to use it a way of giving back to society.
Then you might as well say you’ve been scammed of your time slaving away only to enjoy that money when you have little time left.
Every employee with a pension is praying for their pensions to go up continuously for decades, traders can bet both ways of the market and still end up rich.
One recession and you’ll get a lot of disillusioned employees whose pensions are worth less than they put in years ago.
Making massive sums of money from bad policies of governments, shorting companies or even entire countries and making money from wars by shorting and longing commodities is a repugnant way of making money and is immoral.
This is no better than crypto trading and gambling.
Skill issue. Let me if I can help. Look up "price discovery" and try to understand how it's a service to the world.
> bad policies of governments... wars...
What's wrong with helping the markets react calmly and accurately to these events? Is a surgeon evil for treating a tumor, or a farmer for addressing your hunger?
> This is no better than crypto trading and gambling
Crypto is subject to much debate, but gambling does nothing to help with efficient markets, liquidity, or capital formation. It's strictly worse than trading actual assets.
Great Strawman. A surgeon is more morally good than a trader or hedge fund waiting to short companies to profit from their demise, or it's cousin the private equity industry buying up shares to take over companies and laying people off to make a profit.
You seem to have already forgotten it was these people that caused the 2008 crash with scandals (Look up the LIBOR scandal to remind you) not surgeons or farmers.
> Crypto is subject to much debate, but gambling does nothing to help with efficient markets, liquidity, or capital formation. It's strictly worse than trading actual assets.
I don't think that SPACs, GameStop and other hundreds of unprofitable companies IPOing in the 2010s to 2022s were efficient markets and lots of traders made billions out of them.
A doctor or farmer as you describe have far more morals than these people, as traders and the finance industry make obscene amounts of money while doing this from their desks doing virtually nothing and contributing nothing to the industries and especially society.
Wall Street has invaded tech and the reverse is happening already because the FAANG boom is now over.
You get a tumor, a surgeon removes it.
The economy gets a shock, a trader helps the market absorb it.
Lots of other confusion here, but I don't really care to go point by point, since you seem pretty determined to believe that markets "contribut[e] nothing to the industries and especially society". Maybe someday you'll come back to this topic with more curiosity, but in the meantime if you don't like this sector, you don't have to work in it.
That is not the same thing for traders and you know it.
> The economy gets a shock, a trader helps the market absorb it.
And in the process the trader "absorbs" and enrich themselves with more profits?
The whole point of my argument is about morals, a trader doesn't have to do what you just said, and why should they? It's all about money in the end without caring for the millions of people in society, traders can bet against the markets and win big, at the expense of the economy without helping anything or giving back to society.
In almost all cases, the traders win in the end, employees of other industries that are affected by the economy always lose, (jobs, income, taxes, etc.)
There is a reason why bankers, traders in Wall St in New York or 'The City' in London are disliked.
it's not complicated. suppose Bob wants to buy an Acura NSX and Kazuo wants to sell a Honda NSX. enter trader Joe. he knows Bob, and he knows Kazuo, and he knows that the Honda NSX was also marketed as the Acura NSX. trader Joe can buy the car from Kazuo, obtain an export license, arrange for shipping and tax duties, and sell the car to Bob for a profit. that is called trading.
you're thinking of "speculation." one could argue that the market needs speculators to take the risks that hedgers want to reduce. speculators might also find interesting information and improve the efficiency of market prices. traders intermediate between speculators and hedgers.
now does it make sense?
no.
speculation and trading are practically the same to me, the end result is an unhealthy amount of money and immoral profit extraction from virtually doing nothing at all.
There is some value in being the messenger, but of course they decide to try gambling with their messages and offers in order to try and extract more value out of their message than it is really worth. And they justify it with their overly convoluted story about having to trade through 6 different people, all of whom are trying to scam each other and end up sending 2nd and 3rd and 4th messages of their own farther down the line letting everybody else see a deal is coming and trying to interject themselves in it to extract more value. Until eventually the seller was driven down to the bare minimum sale price, and the buyer it driven up to the maximum cost they can afford. Both buyer and seller are worse off, but all the gambling middlemen came out of it feeling satisfied that they spent all day pretending they aren't complicit because they only dealt with other middlemen and ignore the fact that the group of them as a whole are scamming buyers and sellers.
They justify scalping products by claiming they mostly only deal with other scalpers and as long as the scalped products are moving around pretend they are providing value.