Jane Street suffers $15B hit after meltdown at Situational Awareness

bobstax 115 points 84 comments August 14, 2026
www.ft.com · View on Hacker News

Discussion Highlights (14 comments)

choult

https://archive.is/05jR7

tolugenius

Archive link ( https://archive.is/20260814213548/https://www.ft.com/content... ) Pretty short so I imagine more details and analysis are forthcoming.

JumpCrisscross

“By our calculations, Jane Street ponied up a one-off $200mn to do the deal and then locked in a further $200mn of costs per annum, at least in part, to avoid us gawping at their numbers every quarter. Wowsers” [1]. [1] https://www.ft.com/content/28a51284-98cc-4767-a306-0540d2656...

otterley

They're still up $25B for the year, so it's hard to feel bad for them :-) On a more serious note, Jane Street has hired some very impressive technical talent. I'd work for them, myself, if I didn't have to relocate to Chicago.

lz400

It's all so sketchy. Jane Street were investors in SA but presumably were much more sophisticated and savvy than Leopold. When SA got in trouble, 3 firms got into a bid war for the assets at fire sale prices: Citadel, Jane Street and a third I forgot. Citadel outbid the other 2, but it's all weird, like Jane Street wanted in on the popular boy's book that they knew was going to tank and just were waiting around in the water like sharks.

naveen99

The bigger hit will be all their star quants going full solo (supervised with Claude).

fancyfredbot

Original headline is "Jane Street suffers $15bn loss in July market ructions". HN guidelines do request use of original title and in this specific case the change of title is misleading by implying that situational awareness directly caused losses at JS. In the text it says "the US trading firm was wrongfooted during last month’s market ructions including the meltdown at AI-focused hedge fund Situational Awareness" so while SA is mentioned the implications of a direct link to the losses is less strong. edit: more detail in https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/jane-street-took-15... confirms some losses linked directly to SA and some losses to their own positions.

giraffe_lady

Fuck, ocaml's never getting row polymorphism now, my day is ruined.

wmf

If SA's losses were around $30B does that mean Jane Street owned half?

brcmthrowaway

What is Jane Street doing these days? Still HFT MM?

int32_64

Ever since the infamous work of some of their alumni I have wondered what the culture of JS is actually like.

jxf

The real headline is buried in the article: > Jane Street has generated more than $40bn in net trading revenues in the year to Friday, even accounting for the July loss, which exceeds its entire haul for 2025, according to one of the people familiar with the matter. This would make JS one of the most profitable trading firms of all time even with the loss.

surgical_fire

They were not fully aware of the situation, it seems. ... I'll see myself out.

pjg

Seems like it was banned, at least temporarily from trading in India: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c5y0zgrevl1o

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