Jane Street's Figgie Card Game
Quant Finance Friday Fun - Something fun for the weekend
Jane Street Capital invited a card game in 2013 called “Figgie.”
If you are unfamiliar with Jane Street, it is a quantitative trading firm and global liquidity provider focusing on using sophisticated quantitative analysis and a deep understanding of market mechanics to help keep prices consistent and reliable.
Jane Street was co-founded by Tim Reynolds, Rob Granieri, Marc Gerstein, and Michael Jenkins, three former traders from Susquehanna International Group (SIG) around early 2000.
In the tech world, they are famous for using OCaml1, going so far as to say on their website:
It’s no secret that we’re big believers in functional programming and use OCaml, a statically typed functional language, as our primary development platform. Jane Street’s technology group is small by design, which means we need to maximize the productivity of each person we hire. We believe functional programming helps us do that. But it’s not about productivity alone: programming in a rich and expressive language like OCaml is just more fun. At Jane Street, functional programming isn’t a tool we reserve for some special set of problems. From systems automation to trading systems, from monitoring tools to research code, we write everything that we can in OCaml.
They are huge supporters of math competitions, do a great deal of “thought leadership” around their choices of technology and research, and even have a “Jane Street’s puzzles page” on their website2 where they publish a new puzzle every once in a while.
So it was a fun surprise to learn a few weeks ago that they had invented a card game in 2013 called “Figgie.”
Jane Street's Figgie Card Game
The card game has its website here: https://figgie.com
The pitch is
Figgie…was designed to simulate open-outcry commodities trading. Most of the skill in Figgie is in negotiating trades that benefit both the buyer and seller. Like in poker, your objective in Figgie is to make money over a series of hands.3
In addition to providing the rules (and videos explaining some example hands), the website also has a place where you can play against live and bot players based in the Americas, Europe, and Asia.
Give it a whirl; hopefully, we’ll have more live players in there soon!
That’s all for today :) For more Quant Finance treats, check out our archives.
Stay quanty!
All the best,
Sebastian
https://www.janestreet.com/technology/#:~:text=opportunity%20to%20learn.-,Work,-functionally
https://www.janestreet.com/puzzles/
https://figgie.com/how-to-play