Single-quarter net profit of 10 billion! "Wall Street’s most profitable giant," you may have never even heard of it.
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Proprietary trading firm Jane Street has once again declared the rise of a new generation of market power with a quarterly report that caught the attention of all of Wall Street.
On May 9, according to an article from Wallstreetcn, sources revealed that Jane Street’s trading revenue reached $16.1 billion in the first quarter of this year, setting a new record for a single quarter, more than double that of the same period in 2025. Its net profit also grew more than double year-on-year to $10.3 billion.
This figure not only surpassed JP Morgan’s net trading income of $11.6 billion during the same period but also left Goldman Sachs’ $9.3 billion far behind. With only 3,500 employees, and barely known outside the circle, this proprietary trading company is becoming one of the most profitable institutions on Wall Street.
The core driving force behind this explosive performance comes from its “medium-frequency strategy” based on machine learning models — with holding periods ranging from several days to weeks. Meanwhile, Jane Street’s private equity investments in AI have also become a strong support, with its stake in Anthropic continuously appreciating, and its CoreWeave holdings rising 8% in the first quarter. The energy price volatility triggered by the Iran war provided fertile ground for various trading strategies to flourish.
If Jane Street maintains its current profit pace throughout the year, its net profit will rank among the top ten US listed companies, surpassing Bank of America, Exxon Mobil, and Walmart.
Crushing Wall Street Performance, Medium-Frequency Strategy as Core Engine
In the first quarter this year, market volatility increased significantly. Following the outbreak of the Iran war, Brent crude oil prices frequently saw double-digit swings in a single day; futures prices once hit a four-year high and the surge in energy costs further transmitted to US Treasuries and dollar markets, creating a rare profit window for trading firms.
Jane Street’s performance this time was mainly driven by medium-frequency strategies.
According to the Wallstreetcn article, Bloomberg cited sources revealing that these strategies — supported by machine learning models, and with holding periods from several days to weeks — performed particularly well in volatile market conditions. Meanwhile, Jane Street also has high-frequency trading capabilities, executing thousands of trades in seconds; on the other hand, the company sometimes holds positions for several hours or longer, balancing opportunities across various time frames.
According to a prior article from Wallstreetcn, Jane Street’s 2025 trading revenue for the full year was about $39.6 billion, exceeding all Wall Street banks, with an average revenue per employee of over $11 million. Total compensation for all staff reached $9.4 billion, or about $2.7 million per capita. In just the first quarter this year, the company pulled in $16.1 billion in trading revenue, almost half of last year’s total.
AI Private Equity Investments Become New Growth Pole
Beyond trading, Jane Street has gradually built a private equity portfolio, holding shares in AI companies such as Anthropic and Thinking Machines Lab. As AI valuations continue to climb, this portfolio is contributing more and more to the company’s overall profits.
According to an article from Wallstreetcn, Anthropic is considering a new round of fundraising, possibly at a valuation above $900 billion. Jane Street’s CoreWeave holdings also rose 8% in the first quarter. This means Jane Street’s profit sources are no longer limited to pure trading and market-making but have extended to long-term holdings of cutting-edge tech assets.
This layout dovetails with Jane Street’s strategic evolution over recent years — from an early focus on high-frequency trading, gradually expanding into strategies with longer holding periods and richer dimensions, retaining the core advantages of a market maker while adding more active investment attributes.
Regulatory Arbitrage and Capital Advantage Build Structural Moat
Jane Street’s continued expansion relies on a key structural factor: differences in regulatory frameworks.
On May 9, the latest news from the Financial Times in the UK stated that, as a market participant emerging after the financial crisis, Jane Street is not subject to the capital regulations imposed on “systemically important” banks, granting it much greater flexibility in capital usage. This enables it to deploy capital more efficiently, quickly ramping up or adjusting positions amid volatile markets.
Meanwhile, Jane Street’s capital strength is already close to the scale of trading desks at Wall Street giants. According to previous disclosures, by the end of 2023, its capital exceeded $20 billion, far surpassing traditional high-frequency trading firms. This allows it to hold about $50 billion in securities positions in illiquid markets, vastly outpacing competitors.
In India’s market, Jane Street was temporarily banned by local stock regulators in 2025, who accused it of manipulating the market. Previously, the firm had earned billions of dollars from Indian options trading. This highlights the increasing tension between Jane Street and regulators as it expands globally.
The Logic of the Rise of an Invisible Giant
Jane Street’s story is explored in depth in Wallstreetcn’s book “ETF Global Investment First Lesson,” Chapter 9 of Part One: “The Invisible Giant — Wall Street’s Most Unknown Tycoon.”
The book reveals that Jane Street’s rise is rooted in the unique design of the ETF market. Under the ETF’s “Authorized Participant (AP)” mechanism, professional institutions engage in physical exchange with ETF issuers in the primary market, controlling the supply of ETFs in the secondary market, and use arbitrage to close price gaps between ETF prices and net asset values.
Jane Street is one of the most crucial players in this mechanism, especially dominating in bond ETFs. Arbitrage in bond ETFs is far more difficult than in equity ETFs — bonds have low liquidity, high minimum trading thresholds, and fixed maturity, demanding extremely high resources and pricing skills from APs.
During the 2020 market storm, bond ETFs experienced rare deep discounts, but Jane Street, as the largest market maker, controlled about one-third of total trading volume. Not only did it weather the crisis unscathed, it also profited significantly: Adjusted profits in the first half of 2020 reached $6.3 billion, over 1000% growth versus the same period in 2019.
The book also reveals Jane Street’s talent genes. Its founding team originated from another low-key market-making giant, SIG (Susquehanna International Group). SIG’s key figure, Jeff Yass, introduced poker game theory into options trading, cultivating a trading culture based on probabilistic decisions in uncertain environments.
Jane Street inherited this gene, favors undergraduate recruits, emphasizes probability thinking training, and internally has no CEO, no hierarchy, led informally by dozens of senior managers, exuding a “counter-Wall-Street” geek vibe.
It's precisely this extreme pricing ability for illiquid assets, combined with accumulated capital scale, that made Jane Street one of the biggest beneficiaries in two decades of ETF growth — some believe its profits from ETF business even surpassed BlackRock.
New Order: Proprietary Trading Firms Reshape Wall Street Landscape
Jane Street’s rise is a microcosm of a broader trend: the digitalization of financial markets and the global expansion of ETFs are shifting pricing power from traditional giants to a new generation of proprietary trading firms.
Jane Street’s 2025 global ETF trading volume reached $60 trillion, while actively trading options linked to indexes, ETFs, and individual stocks. Similar firms like Hudson River Trading also play key market-making roles across thousands of assets, accumulating astonishing profits by capturing tiny price spreads.
By comparison, traditional banks are constrained by capital regulations, business diversification, and higher operating costs, making it hard to compete with these focused proprietary firms in pure trading profitability. JP Morgan’s $11.6 billion net trading income in Q1, although a record, comes with far greater staff and capital consumption than Jane Street.
A new trading order dominated by small proprietary firms, with big banks receding, is quietly taking shape on Wall Street.
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