Wrestling the World into Rows with Eric Mannes

"Alternative data" is Wall Street's name for information that comes from non-traditional sources: satellite photos of parking lots, credit card panels, weather forecasts. Eric Mannes has spent over a decade at Jane Street, first as a commodities trader and now helping lead the firm's alternative data team. In this episode, Eric and Ron talk about what it takes to turn messy external data into datasets a trading strategy can rely on. Along the way, they cover the day oil futures settled at a negative price and the systems that broke as a result; the years when the commodities desk's risk system was one very large Excel spreadsheet; the hard question of what a company even is; and why better ML models raise the value of careful data engineering.

You can find the transcript for this episode on our website.

Some links to topics that came up in the discussion:

• Figgie
• Adverse selection
• 2020 Russia–Saudi Arabia oil price war
• Dual-listed company
• "LAMBDA: The ultimate Excel worksheet function"
• Trino
• The Bitter Lesson
• Learn more about Jane Street’s internship program.
• Apply for Data Engineering roles at Jane Street