The Jane Street India thing made me realize most "elite" traders are just bullies with deep pockets

I spent years thinking these quant funds were doing something magical. Working through my finance degree, trading options on the side, I genuinely believed firms like Jane Street and Citadel had unlocked some secret level of market understanding. Like they had PhDs from MIT building these beautiful mathematical frameworks for trading. Must be incredible stuff behind those closed doors right Then that India options situation blew up and we got to peek behind the curtain It was pathetic. Not sophisticated at all. The strategy that generated their biggest win ever was basically just buying puts, writing calls, and then dumping massive amounts of the underlying stock into an illiquid market. That's it. No genius required. Just having billions in capital and the willingness to throw your weight around What kills me is how ordinary this is. I've seen more creative trade structures from random people on wallstreetbets who are just messing around. The only reason this works is because you're big enough to move markets yourself. It's not clever, it's just brute force with a compliance team I tried finding someone who could explain why I'm wrong about this. Asked my derivatives professor. Emailed Matt Levine and got nothing back, though I doubt he'd admit it anyway since Jane Street pays him to speak at their events every year. Nobody has been able to tell me I'm misreading the situation These firms aren't smarter than retail traders. They're just bigger. The mystique is completely gone for me now. All that secrecy and prestige and the actual playbook is something a sophomore finance student could sketch out in 10 minutes if they had a few billion to deploy