Icosian Reflections

…a tendency to systematize and a keen sense

that we live in a broken world.

IN  WHICH Ross Rheingans-Yoo—a sometime quantitative trader, economist, expat, EA, artist, educator, and game developer—writes on topics of int­erest.

Onward, again

This January, I left my job as a trader at Jane Street (most recently in Hong Kong) to take a role leading a project at the FTX Foundation. I have positive things to say about Jane Street as an excellent place for many of my friends to work, and my open offer of thoughts and advice to anyone hoping to work there remains, well, open.

Looking forward, I'm thrilled to be working with the Foundation because I want to help build a better future. I've been interested in thoughtful, rigorous, altruistic attempts to improve the world since 2013, and pledged in 2016 to donate at least a tenth of my income to the most effective organizations I can find. I am beyond excited to find an opportunity where I estimate I'll do even more good than I could by earning and donating a quant trader's salary (which I still think was really, really good for the world, on any objective scale).


It's still early days here, and we don't yet know all that the things the Foundation's work will cover. To start, colleagues of mine just launched the Future Fund, a grantmaking initiative with the goal of improving the lives of future generations in highly levered ways. The launch blog post, Areas of Interest, and Project Ideas pages give a taste of where the Future Fund has set their sights, and I'm extremely excited about the possible ways their work can go from here.

For my own work, I'm not working on grantmaking or the Future Fund directly. Rather, I'm currently heads-down on an in-house skunkworks moonshot to make the world safer against catastrophic pandemics. (More on that later.

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Onward, abroad!

attention-conservation notice: short personal-update post

Tomorrow, I'll be moving to Hong Kong (for at least a few years). I'll be working for Jane Street, as I was in New York, doing roughly the same things, and still earning to give. Most of my worldly possessions are already on the slow boat to China, so there's no going back now...

I expect to be thrown back into learning-things mode for a while, but after that to have time to travel, to live in a new place, and spend some time off the well-trodden path. Expect either more blog posts, or fewer; I'm not yet sure which.

Meanwhile, feel free to send any travel recommendations my way, or let me know if you'll be in that part of the world anytime soon -- I honestly don't know when I'll be back in the New York/Boston area next!

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Onward

attention-conservation notice: this is a personal-life-update post, not a deep-philosophical-commentary post.

I've finally left the environs of Cambridge to do...whatever comes next...in New York City. I really enjoyed my time at Harvard and was truly sad to see the community of friends that I'd come to love go their assorted and separate ways, but on a personal level, it was time. So I'm glad to be moving on to the next thing.

One piece of "the next thing" is that I'm beginning work as an trader at Jane Street. It's an amazing company that I'm incredibly excited to be returning to full-time -- one of the most intellectually stimulating environments I've found anywhere, with a double helping of diverse and varied day-to-day projects and a culture of social trust, intellectual humility, and collaborative truth-seeking.

In many (great) ways, I feel like I'm starting college again -- my days are long and full, all of my work is interesting and new, and once again I feel like I'm out of my depth and running flat-out to keep up. Coming from the place of comfort I had reached at the end of college, it's certainly a pleasant change.

Incidentally, we're already hiring summer interns for both trader and dev roles, so if you want to work with some of the most clever, intellectually curious, and deeply thoughtful people I know (plus me), do drop me a line, and I'll be happy to chat, answer questions, or just point you at the application.


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However, my employer is emphatically not the reason that I've been negligent about writing in the last month. The only explanation for that is

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