Responding to a lawsuit filed by Jane Street this month, Douglas Schadewald said it was “not only wrong, but impossible” that he and a fellow defector, Daniel Spottiswood, cost the company more than $150 million in profits between February and March when they went to work for rival Millennium. Labeling Jane Street’s claim as “reckless speculation,” Schadewald said the amount the duo brought in for Millennium through mid-April was about $4 million.
In its complaint, Jane Street accused the two of using its “immensely valuable” proprietary strategy in their new jobs. Jane Street said its profits from using the strategy fell by 50% in March, a drop it said could only be attributable to “the entrance of a competitor using the same strategy.” The description of the strategy was heavily redacted in Jane Street’s complaint.
In a signed statement, Schadewald denied using Jane Street’s strategies or any of its confidential intellectual property and said his name was being smeared “to try to prevent me from doing honest work for a competitor.”
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He suggested that Jane Street’s losses could be due to a risky trading strategy. “Millennium mandated daily loss limits — i.e., the amount of capital that my team and I are permitted to risk losing in a given day,” he said in the filing. On the other hand, “Jane Street took an extreme amount of risk,” according to Schadewald’s statement, which made it “susceptible to very large drawdowns in large market moves.”
In a separate declaration, Spottiswood also denied wrongdoing.
“At Millennium, I have not used, and do not intend to use, any trade secrets, confidential information, or proprietary information of Jane Street,” he said. Instead, Spottiswood said, he relies on “general skills, knowledge, and experience” and publicly available information, as well as what he learned before he worked for Jane Street.
Jane Street representatives didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment outside regular business hours.
At a hearing last week in Manhattan, US District Judge Paul Engelmayer denied Jane Street’s request for an order barring Millennium and the two traders from using the strategy at issue, saying the firm could be compensated if it’s found to have suffered any harm. Engelmayer put the case on an expedited schedule, setting a trial date in July.
A Jane Street lawyer said at the hearing that the strategy was one of the firm’s most lucrative and expressed fear that even identifying the country involved would lead to others “picking apart” the details. Lawyers for the defendants inadvertently revealed during the hearing that the strategy involved options trading in India.
Schadewald said in his statement that Jane Street expected him to draw on his previous experience working for Barclays and is now faulting him for again drawing on the expertise he has built up, this time at a new employer.
He said that as far as he could tell from court filings, the “strategy” Jane Street is trying to protect “would cover any type of options trading in India.”
“The complaint appears to suggest that the existence of inefficiencies within the Indian options market and the size of this market are trade secrets or proprietary to Jane Street,” according to Schadewald’s statement.
The case is Jane Street Group LLC v. Millennium Management LLC, 24-cv-02783, US District Court, Southern District of New York (Manhattan).