Jane Street’s trading revenue in 2025 was $39.6 billion, surpassing all Wall Street banks.

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Against the backdrop of tighter banking regulations and the expansion of non-bank institutions, high-frequency trading giant Jane Street, with only 3,500 employees, achieved the highest single-year trading revenue in Wall Street history.

According to Bloomberg, Jane Street's trading revenue last year reached $39.6 billion, surpassing all global investment banks including JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs, making it the first non-bank institution in history to exceed Wall Street’s top banks in this metric.

Calculated per employee, Jane Street created an average revenue of over $11 million per employee last year. The company’s core market-making business benefited from market volatility, and its holdings of private company equity greatly appreciated—especially the soaring valuations of AI startups.

Jane Street started in 2000, with its core profit model based on capturing cross-market price gaps. After the 2008 financial crisis, regulators imposed a series of rules to constrain the risk exposure of “too big to fail” banks, but non-bank institutions were not subject to the same capital restrictions, enabling them to rapidly fill the market void left by banks.

Scale dominates peers, per capita revenue exceeds $11 million

Jane Street’s annual trading revenue of $39.6 billion puts it 11% ahead of its closest traditional competitor, JPMorgan Chase—which reported $35.8 billion in trading revenue for the same period, while Goldman Sachs reported $31.1 billion.

Among non-bank peers, Citadel Securities and Hudson River Trading also set records last year, but their revenues were $12.2 billion and $12.3 billion respectively, a huge gap with Jane Street.

Jane Street’s full-year adjusted EBITDA reached $31.2 billion, with a total staff of only about 3,500 people, resulting in per-capita revenue of over $11 million. Bloomberg noted that this data confirms that “a power shift is happening in one of the world’s most profitable financial sectors.”

Non-bank institutions fill regulatory vacuum

Jane Street's rise is closely related to U.S. regulatory restrictions on proprietary trading by deposit institutions following the 2008 financial crisis.

At that time, regulators imposed a series of rules to constrain “too big to fail” banks’ risk exposure, but non-bank institutions were not subject to the same capital restrictions, enabling them to quickly fill the market gap left by banks.

Jane Street started in 2000, initially focusing on trading American Depositary Receipts (ADRs), then gradually deepening in Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs), and expanding to various global asset classes, with its core profit model based on capturing cross-market price gaps.

Like other high-frequency trading firms, Jane Street has the technical capacity to process thousands of trades within seconds, and may hold some positions for hours or even weeks, employing both high-frequency and medium/low-frequency strategies.

AI investments boost earnings, Anthropic’s valuation skyrockets

Beyond its core market-making business, Jane Street's holdings of private company equity have also become an important income source. In the third quarter last year, the company recorded $830 million in profits from private company investments, with the appreciation of its equity in artificial intelligence company Anthropic PBC as the main driver.

In September last year, Anthropic was valued at $183 billion; subsequently, this AI firm—which owns the Claude large model and Mythos project—saw its valuation in a new fundraising round rise to $380 billion, and some investor bids suggested its valuation may reach as high as $800 billion or more.

Additionally, Jane Street is currently in financing talks with cloud computing startup Fluidstack, and has invested an additional $1 billion in AI cloud service provider CoreWeave, showing its continuing expansion in the AI infrastructure sector.

Accused of market manipulation and insider trading, regulatory challenges emerge

Despite record-breaking performance, Jane Street has recently faced noticeably increased legal and regulatory pressures.

By mid-2025, Indian authorities accused the firm of market manipulation in one of its most profitable trading strategies. Jane Street denied the charges and has contested them.

This February, bankrupt Terraform Labs filed suit with the court, accusing Jane Street’s insider trading of triggering a roughly $40 billion crash in cryptocurrencies associated with Terraform; this week, Jane Street has applied to the judge for dismissal of the suit.

These legal disputes have pushed the historically low-profile firm into the public eye, but recent performance data suggests these troubles have not substantially affected its business expansion momentum.

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