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Alex Gerko earned £682mn from the profits of his trading firm XTX Markets last year, cementing the billionaire founder’s position as one of the UK’s richest people.
A £1.28bn pot of profits was split between Gerko and his quantitative traders, with the other 30 people sharing £597mn, according to a recent filing at Companies House.
It marks the biggest payout earned by XTX’s traders since the market maker was founded a decade ago and underscores the British company’s growth. The profits split between traders rose 71 per cent compared with the £747mn shared in 2023, according to filings.
Gerko is one of the UK’s richest people and the country’s biggest individual taxpayer, according to Sunday Times estimates. To manage his growing wealth, the Russia-born mathematician set up a family office last year, named Cromulon Capital after a human head-shaped planet from the sci-fi show Rick and Morty.
The number of quant traders working at XTX and earning a share of profits rose from 25 in 2023 to 30 in 2024. Overall, the company is much smaller than rival trading houses, employing about 250 people.
XTX Markets declined to comment.
XTX is one of the UK’s most profitable private businesses. It made £1.3bn in profits after tax last year, a 54 per cent rise on the year before.
Gerko owns about 75 per cent of the company and typically runs it with a co-chief executive. Former JPMorgan executive Hans Buehler held that role most recently but stepped down this summer. XTX said in July that Buehler was returning to academia.
The London-based company makes money by using vast amounts of computing power to detect tiny margins on millions of trades across currency, debt, equity, commodity and crypto markets. It handles about $250bn worth of trades every day and owns 25,000 artificial intelligence chips, mainly Nvidia ones, that power its trading.
In January, XTX said it would invest €1bn in a data centre it is building in Finland to manage the company’s computing power. Gerko is separately funding the creation of a new maths secondary school in north London, and has previously backed AI start-ups including Anthropic and autonomous vehicle company Wayve.
XTX competes with trading houses such as Citadel Securities, Virtu and Jane Street.