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The popularity of E.T.F.s is soaring, this low fee product now accounts for a third of all publicly traded equities. As these products have grown investors profiting from them has also increased. The ones profiting the most are those who can build complex financial models and write computer code that takes advantage of market anomalies.
In a word, these are not your suit-and-tie bond and stock traders of yore, riding the commuter train into Manhattan. They are, instead, the pick of the global brain crop. Here is a small sample of Jane Street’s main traders: Tao Wang (doctorate in philosophy and finance from the National University of Singapore), Min Zhu (master’s in chemistry, Columbia), Brett Harrison (master’s in computer science with a focus in artificial intelligence, Harvard) and Srihari Seshadri (bachelor’s in computer science, Carnegie Mellon). For large asset management firms like BlackRock, Vanguard and Invesco, the business of rolling out one E.T.F. after another has become a major profit center. But in many ways, the real money is being made by the trading firms that specialize in making a market in these securities.
