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Jane Street made $39.6 billion from trading in 2025, more than JPMorgan or Goldman Sachs, with roughly 3,500 employees and no CEO. Jane Street: The $40 Billion Ghost of Wall Street is a documentary history of the firm. It starts with a group of Susquehanna poker players leaving to go it alone in 1999 and follows the company through the OCaml rewrite, the ETF boom, the COVID bond market rescue, the Sam Bankman-Fried and FTX fallout, the Millennium trade secrets fight, and the SEBI order in India that turned a quiet market maker into the center of the world’s most important market manipulation case.

TLDW

Rob Granieri, Tim Reynolds and Michael Jenkins learned at Susquehanna to treat trading as a series of bets to be judged on their expected value, not their outcome. In 1999 they left to found Jane Street with IBM programmer Marc Gerstein as a full partner, and they started by arbitraging ADRs, the gaps between a foreign stock’s home price and its New York price. After Yaron Minsky arrived, the firm rebuilt its Excel-based systems in the obscure language OCaml. It then made itself the toll booth of the ETF market by specializing in hard-to-price funds. It came through 2008 intact and replaced its departed founder with no CEO at all, running on a shared profit pool and no non-compete contracts. The firm lost about $300 million by calling the 2016 election correctly and then betting the market would fall. For years it spent $50 to $75 million annually on crash insurance that paid off in 2020: it made $8.4 billion in six months and was tapped by the Federal Reserve to help run emergency bond purchases. Its alumni Sam Bankman-Fried, Caroline Ellison and Brett Harrison went on to FTX and Alameda Research. The firm sued the London Metal Exchange over canceled nickel trades and became an anchor market maker for the spot bitcoin ETFs. It built an Indian options strategy worth about $1 billion a year, sued Millennium when two traders took that strategy there, and in July 2025 was banned from India by SEBI, which seized about $566 million. Days earlier, founder Rob Granieri had been tied to a South Sudan arms plot. Trading revenue still nearly doubled in 2025.

Thoughts

The most underrated decision in the whole story comes early and looks boring: making a programmer an equal partner in 1999, then betting the firm’s core systems on OCaml in 2005. The documentary presents OCaml as a quirky choice, but what it shows is a management philosophy. Senior traders personally read every line of code before it touched money, so code had to be readable by the people carrying the risk. A compact, type-checked language made that possible, where Java made it impossible. The side effects compounded. It drew people who learn things for fun, and code that competitors could not easily reuse. Most firms treat technology as a cost center. Jane Street decided the software was the trading, and that one call explains most of what followed.

The put option habit is the best lesson for anyone who manages risk, including individual investors. Paying $50 to $75 million a year for insurance that expires worthless year after year looks like waste on every annual report until the year it doesn’t. The real payoff in 2020 wasn’t the puts themselves. It was that the firm could keep trading at full size while everyone else was protecting their balance sheet. That is how a 21-year-old firm with no banking license ended up executing the Fed’s emergency bond purchases alongside JPMorgan, Morgan Stanley and Citigroup. Survival capacity is an option on the rare moments when liquidity is worth the most, and very few organizations have the patience to keep paying for it through a decade of calm.

The FTX section is uncomfortable for a firm that prides itself on culture. Bankman-Fried and Ellison took the Jane Street toolkit to crypto: the kimchi-premium arbitrage was “one thing, two prices,” the same idea as ADRs and ETFs. What they left behind was the part that made the toolkit safe, which the documentary puts in one line: at Jane Street, somebody was always checking the risk. A probabilistic mindset without independent risk controls is just a sophisticated way to justify ever-larger bets. It’s a useful reminder that a firm’s culture lives in its structure (pooled pay, line-by-line code review, position limits), not in the people it trains. The people leave and the structure stays.

India is where the story turns from a success profile into an open question, and it deserves more attention than the FTX drama. The documentary’s key point is structural: India’s weekly index options market grew to hundreds of times the size of the underlying stock trading, making up roughly 61% of the world’s equity options volume. In a market that lopsided, whoever has enough capital to move the underlying stocks can move the value of a far larger options book sitting on top of them. The January 17, 2024 Bank Nifty trade, heavy buying in the morning and heavy selling into expiry in the afternoon, is exactly the pattern that both sides can describe in their own words. Jane Street calls it arbitrage and hedging. SEBI calls it a fingerprint found on 21 days. The honest conclusion is the one the video reaches: the line between aggressive arbitrage and manipulation has never been cleanly drawn, and whatever India decides will set a template for regulators everywhere. The fact that India’s options volume dropped to a four-month low when Jane Street stopped trading tells you how much of that market it was.

The closing argument is that every advantage was designed in the first five years and the last twenty were compounding. That’s mostly right, but the back half of the video shows the cost of one of those early designs: invisibility. No non-competes worked for years, and then two traders walked a billion-dollar strategy to Millennium. Suing meant revealing the secret, and revealing the secret sent a billion-dollar number straight to the regulator in Mumbai. The Granieri arms-plot story and the SEBI order landing within ten days of each other ended any chance of staying a ghost. The final line lands: Jane Street prices everything except itself. The next chapter depends on whether a firm built to be unknown can operate as a known, politically visible institution without giving up the discipline that made it work.

Key Takeaways

Jane Street earned $39.6 billion in trading revenue in 2025, more than JPMorgan, America’s largest bank, earned from trading worldwide, and nearly double its 2024 figure of $20.5 billion.
Its systems touch roughly one in every ten stock trades in North America, and it runs with about 3,500 people, which works out to over $11 million of revenue per employee.
The founders came from Susquehanna, a Philadelphia-area firm that made money on Black Monday in 1987 and trained new hires by having them play poker against the partners for weeks.
Susquehanna’s core idea was that a trade is a bet, and it judged bets on their quality rather than their outcome. You could lose money on a good bet and still get promoted.
On August 31, 1999, Rob Granieri, Tim Reynolds and Michael Jenkins quit Susquehanna on the same day to start their own firm.
The fourth founder, Marc Gerstein, was an IBM software developer brought in as a full partner, not as support staff, which signaled that the founders saw technology as the trading itself.
The name Jane Street was deliberately plain: no founder’s name on the door, nothing memorable, profit over headlines.
The first edge was ADR arbitrage, trading the small, constant gaps between a foreign company’s home-market price and its American depositary receipt price in New York.
By 2003 the firm was moving millions of dollars a day on Excel spreadsheets full of homemade code. A rewrite in Java was abandoned because the code was even harder for traders to read.
Senior traders personally read every line of code before it could trade real money. If they could not understand it, it did not trade.
Yaron Minsky, a Princeton math graduate with a Cornell computer science PhD, joined part time in 2003, wrote 80,000 lines of OCaml in six months, and stayed to build a research group.
In 2005 Jane Street rewrote its core trading systems in OCaml. The prototype took three months and was trading real money three months after that. The firm became the largest industrial user of OCaml in the world.
ETFs, dismissed by big banks as a toy after the SPDR launched in 1993, became Jane Street’s core business as they grew to hundreds of billions of dollars.
As an authorized participant, Jane Street creates and redeems ETF shares to keep fund prices in line with their holdings, and it specialized in hard-to-price funds holding foreign and illiquid assets.
In 2007 Jane Street’s capital was about $228 million while Lehman Brothers held $639 billion in assets. The small, unleveraged firm survived 2008 by design: no trader could sink the company and nobody’s pay depended on gambling.
Post-2008 regulation pushed banks out of risky trading, and that business moved to non-bank firms like Jane Street, including bond markets the banks once controlled.
When Tim Reynolds left in 2012, nobody replaced him. The firm chose to have no CEO, run informally by 30 to 40 senior leaders.
Everyone is paid from the firm’s total profit rather than their own book, removing the incentive for any one trader to swing for the fences.
Jane Street does not use non-compete contracts, betting that culture rather than legal documents would create loyalty.
Hiring relies on probability puzzles and betting games that test how candidates behave under uncertainty with money on the line. Interns earn over $16,000 a month.
Sam Bankman-Fried joined from MIT in 2013 and built the 2016 election-night trading operation, which called Trump’s win minutes ahead of the networks.
Jane Street bet the market would fall after a Trump win. It rallied instead, and the firm lost roughly $300 million, its worst single loss.
Through the 2010s, capital passed $1 billion by 2016, holdings grew from under $4 billion to more than $20 billion, and corporate bond positions went from $57 million to billions.
Jane Street spent an estimated $50 to $75 million a year on put options as standing crash insurance, as a matter of policy.
In the COVID crash the S&P 500 fell almost 34% in about a month. The insurance let the firm keep trading at full size, and it generated $8.4 billion in trading revenue in the first half of 2020.
When the bond market froze in March 2020, bond ETFs were the only place fixed income still had live prices. Jane Street traded that gap in size, and in September 2020 the Fed added it to the firms executing its emergency bond purchases.
In 2020 Jane Street traded $17 trillion in securities and earned $11.4 billion. Leaked bond documents led the Financial Times to unmask it in January 2021.
Because market making earns a cut of volume in either direction, the 2021 boom and 2022 crash both paid. 2023 was the fourth straight year above $10 billion in net trading revenue.
Scale creates a flywheel: more trades, more data, better prices, more trades. Staff turnover is around 6%, and average pay at the London arm is reported above $1 million.
Bankman-Fried’s Alameda Research started with cross-country bitcoin arbitrage. Caroline Ellison followed him from Jane Street in 2018, and Brett Harrison later became president of FTX US.
FTX collapsed in November 2022 with about $8 billion of customer money missing. Jane Street had no involvement, but its name was attached to the fraud through the people it trained.
When the London Metal Exchange canceled billions in nickel trades in March 2022, Jane Street publicly sued for $15.3 million on principle. It lost in 2023.
After scaling back crypto amid the regulatory crackdown, Jane Street became an anchor market maker for the spot bitcoin ETFs approved in January 2024, including one of four authorized participants for BlackRock’s fund.
India became roughly 61% of global equity options volume, driven by millions of retail traders buying cheap weekly index options. SEBI’s own research shows over 90% of them lose money.
Jane Street’s India options strategy earned about $1 billion in 2023, close to a tenth of global profits.
Two traders central to that strategy left for Millennium in early 2024. Jane Street sued, the strategy was exposed in open court, and the case settled in December.
On July 3, 2025 SEBI banned four Jane Street entities and seized about $566 million, citing a pattern like January 17, 2024 on 21 days and estimating $4.3 billion in India profits over just over two years.
Jane Street deposited the funds in escrow, resumed trading within weeks, and appealed to the Securities Appellate Tribunal, calling the order fundamentally mistaken. The case is unresolved.
Founder Rob Granieri wired $7 million to activist Peter Biar Ajak, money prosecutors say bought weapons for a plot against South Sudan’s government. Granieri says he was duped and was never charged.
The documentary’s explanation of why Jane Street won: no celebrity CEO, pay tied to firmwide profit, technology as the product, patience measured in decades, and everything designed in the first five years.

Detailed Summary

The Susquehanna School and the 1999 Walkout

The story starts in 1987, when Wall Street still ran on shouting and instinct. Susquehanna opened outside Philadelphia on the opposite premise: gut feeling is the problem, and every trade is a bet most traders don’t know how to size. When the market fell 22% on Black Monday, instinct traders were wiped out and Susquehanna made money. The firm functioned more like a school than a trading desk. New hires played poker against partners for weeks to learn when to keep betting, when to stop, and how much to risk under uncertainty. Rob Granieri, a University of Pennsylvania graduate whose family ran a banquet hall in Norristown, joined in 1992 and worked alongside Tim Reynolds and Michael Jenkins. By 1999 the three concluded the school had nothing left to teach them, and all three quit on August 31. The timing was deliberate. Trading floors were giving way to computers, spreads were shrinking, and the founders believed small, fast teams with better technology would beat the big banks.

A Programmer Partner, a Plain Name, and ADR Arbitrage

The fourth founder, Marc Gerstein, was an IBM software developer who joined as an equal partner, which was almost unheard of in 1999. The name Jane Street was chosen to be forgettable. The first edge was American depositary receipts: the same foreign company trading at two prices, one at home and one in New York, pushed apart by time zones, currencies and slow information. Each gap was worth only cents, and most firms ignored it. Jane Street built a machine to capture those cents thousands of times a day, and the pennies became millions.

From Excel to OCaml

By 2003 the firm’s core systems ran on Excel spreadsheets full of homemade code, and one bad line could cost a fortune. The firm’s rule was that senior traders personally read every line before it touched real money. A rewrite in Java produced code that was even harder to read, so it was abandoned. Then Yaron Minsky joined part time. He used OCaml, an academic language that almost nobody in finance used. OCaml catches whole categories of bugs before code can run, and it reads almost like math. Minsky wrote 80,000 lines in six months, stayed on, and built a research group. In 2005 the firm bet its core systems on OCaml. The prototype took three months, and three months later it was trading real money. By 2007 Jane Street had more than 130 people across New York, Chicago and Tokyo and was the largest industrial user of OCaml in the world. The language attracted people who learn for fun and made the firm’s code useless to competitors.

The ETF Toll Booth

The SPDR launched on the American Stock Exchange in 1993, and big banks treated ETFs as a retail toy. By the mid-2000s ETFs held hundreds of billions of dollars. To Jane Street’s founders, an ETF was the ADR game again: the fund’s price and the combined price of its holdings should match, but they drift all day. Authorized participants close those gaps by creating or redeeming shares and keep a small profit on each correction. Jane Street became one, and it specialized in the funds nobody else wanted, those holding foreign stocks and hard-to-price assets. By the late 2000s, anyone trading an ETF had a real chance of trading against Jane Street. It had become part of the market’s plumbing.

Surviving 2008 and Going CEO-Free

In 2007 Jane Street’s capital was about $228 million, while Lehman Brothers alone held $639 billion in assets, mostly funded with debt. When housing broke, leverage turned losses into collapses: Bear Stearns in March 2008 and Lehman’s record bankruptcy in September. Jane Street’s design protected it. No single trader could bet big enough to sink the firm, pay didn’t reward gambling, and the code had been checked line by line. New regulation then pushed banks out of risky trading, and that business moved to quant firms, including bond markets once controlled by investment banks. In 2012 Tim Reynolds left to spend his fortune on art schools and resorts. Nobody replaced him. Jane Street chose to have no CEO and to be run informally by 30 to 40 senior leaders, reasoning that a single boss meant one ego, one set of mistakes, and one person competitors could study. Everyone is paid from firmwide profit, and there are no non-compete contracts.

Hiring Bettors, and the 2016 Election Trade

Interviews were built around probability puzzles and betting games designed to reveal how candidates handle risk. Granieri personally recruited an MIT physics student named Sam Bankman-Fried, who earned about $300,000 in his first year. In 2016 Bankman-Fried led the firm’s election-night project. Traders were assigned to individual states and read county-level returns to call results before the networks, which wait for near-certainty. Florida panhandle data reached Jane Street about five minutes before CNN, and Trump’s odds on the firm’s screens jumped from 5% to 60%. The firm shorted the market in size. Markets fell overnight and then rallied, as investors began pricing in tax cuts and growth. Jane Street lost roughly $300 million, the worst loss in its history. In 2017 Bankman-Fried left, walking away from a million-dollar bonus.

Crash Insurance and the 2020 Payoff

Through the 2010s Jane Street compounded quietly. Capital hit $1 billion by 2016, holdings passed $20 billion, and corporate bond positions grew from $57 million into the billions. Every year it also spent an estimated $50 to $75 million on put options that expired worthless, as a policy of surviving everything. In February and March 2020 the S&P 500 fell from 3,386 to 2,237, the fastest 30% drop in history, and the VIX spiked above 80. The puts paid out, and more importantly the firm could keep trading at full size while competitors pulled back. It generated $8.4 billion in trading revenue in the first half of 2020, with profits up about elevenfold.

The Bond Market Freeze and the Fed

The bigger emergency in March 2020 was in bonds, where buyers disappeared and prices froze. Bond ETFs kept trading, and they became the only live prices in fixed income. They traded far below the stale official values of the bonds inside them. Closing those gaps took capital and nerve, and Jane Street had both. In September 2020 the Federal Reserve added it to the small group executing its emergency bond purchases alongside JPMorgan, Morgan Stanley and Citigroup. For the year the firm traded $17 trillion in securities and earned $11.4 billion. Its own borrowing documents exposed those numbers, and in January 2021 the Financial Times called it the most important Wall Street firm nobody had heard of.

Boom, Bust, and the Flywheel

The 2021 everything rally, including GameStop, gave way to the 2022 inflation crash. It made no difference to Jane Street, which collects a small cut of trading in either direction. 2023 was the fourth straight year above $10 billion in net trading revenue, and gross trading revenue of $21.9 billion was roughly a seventh of what the twelve major global investment banks earned from trading combined. Scale feeds on itself: more trades bring more data, which brings better prices, which win more trades. With capital up $18 billion in five years, Jane Street was competing with banks rather than other market makers. New traders’ packages reach $425,000, and turnover runs around 6%.

FTX, Alameda, and the Jane Street Alumni

Bankman-Fried’s Alameda Research began by arbitraging bitcoin’s higher prices in Asia, the same “one thing, two prices” playbook. Caroline Ellison, a Stanford math graduate trained in Jane Street’s probability culture, joined in March 2018. FTX launched in 2019 and was valued at $32 billion by 2021, complete with Super Bowl ads, the FTX Arena naming deal, and an earn-to-give philosophy. Customer money was flowing from the exchange into Alameda’s trading. A leaked balance sheet in November 2022 showed Alameda was built largely on FTX’s own token, customers ran, and about $8 billion was missing. FTX filed for bankruptcy on November 11. Bankman-Fried, Ellison and FTX US president Brett Harrison all had Jane Street on their resumes. Ellison pleaded guilty, testified in October 2023, and received two years. Bankman-Fried was convicted on all counts and sentenced to 25 years. Jane Street was legally untouched but publicly branded.

Nickel, Bitcoin ETFs, and Choosing the Home Turf

In March 2022, after Russia invaded Ukraine, a nickel short squeeze sent prices up several times over. The London Metal Exchange canceled billions in completed trades to save the losing side, wiping out Jane Street’s winning trades. The firm did something market makers almost never do and sued the exchange publicly, for $15.3 million, on the principle that an exchange that can delete winning trades breaks the game. It lost in 2023. In crypto, Jane Street scaled back after FTX, and to the industry it looked like a retreat. When the SEC approved spot bitcoin ETFs in January 2024, Jane Street was named an anchor market maker for every one of them and one of four authorized participants for BlackRock’s fund. It had waited for crypto to come to its home turf.

India’s Options Market and the Millennium Lawsuit

During the pandemic Jane Street registered JSI Investments in Mumbai. India’s National Stock Exchange had become the world’s largest derivatives market by contract count, with millions of students, shopkeepers and office workers buying weekly index options on their phones. India came to account for roughly 61% of global equity options volume, and the options market dwarfed the underlying stock trading. Jane Street’s India strategy made about $1 billion in 2023. In early 2024, Douglas Schadewald and Daniel Spottiswood, two traders at the center of it, left for Millennium, and with no non-competes nothing stopped them. Jane Street sued in Manhattan without naming the strategy, but at an April 19 hearing it came out that the strategy was Indian options trading and was worth a billion dollars a year. Millennium countered that Jane Street’s India profits kept setting records after the traders left. The case settled in December on undisclosed terms, but the number had already reached India.

SEBI’s Order and the Arbitrage Versus Manipulation Question

SEBI’s analysts rebuilt Jane Street’s positions minute by minute. In February 2025 the NSE sent a warning letter, and SEBI says the patterns continued anyway. On July 3, 2025 a 105-page interim order banned four Jane Street entities from Indian markets and seized about $566 million. The centerpiece was January 17, 2024: Jane Street bought about 4,370 crore rupees of banking stocks and futures in the morning, which lifted the index, while holding a large bearish options position. It sold everything in the afternoon, the index sagged into expiry, and the options paid about 735 crore rupees, roughly $85 million. SEBI says it found the same fingerprint on 21 days and estimated $4.3 billion in India earnings in just over two years, against its own research showing more than 90% of retail derivatives traders lose money. Jane Street calls this ordinary arbitrage and hedging. When it stopped trading, India’s options activity fell to a four-month low. The firm paid the full amount into escrow, resumed trading within weeks, and appealed to the Securities Appellate Tribunal, calling the probe biased. The hearing was postponed in early 2026.

Rob Granieri and the South Sudan Arms Plot

Rob Granieri, the last founder listed on the firm’s site, gives quietly to justice reform, psychedelic research and human rights causes connected to Garry Kasparov. In February 2024 he met Peter Biar Ajak, a former child soldier turned Harvard fellow and democracy activist, and wired him $7 million. Prosecutors say the money bought AK-47s, missiles and grenade launchers for a plot to overthrow South Sudan’s government. Ajak was charged in Arizona in March 2024, and his own lawyers later named Granieri in a filing. Bloomberg broke the story on June 25, 2025. Granieri says he was duped, he was never charged, and Ajak was sentenced to 46 months. SEBI’s order landed days later: two scandals on two continents in ten days.

Record Revenue and the Verdict Still Out

The machine kept accelerating: $20.5 billion in 2024, a single 2025 quarter of $10.1 billion that beat every Wall Street bank’s trading for that quarter, and $39.6 billion for the full year. The India appeal is still pending, and a new Manhattan lawsuit accuses the firm of trading on inside information ahead of a crypto collapse, which Jane Street calls a transparent attempt to extract money. The documentary’s closing thesis is that the trades that keep markets honest are the same trades a regulator can call manipulation. It also notes that every secret Jane Street had escaped against its will, through a lawsuit, a regulator, an indictment and a book.

Notable Quotes

“At that firm, nobody cared if a trade made money. They cared whether it was a good bet. You could lose money on a good bet and still get promoted.”
Narrator, on the Susquehanna culture that trained Jane Street’s founders

“Making an engineer an equal partner told you exactly what these founders believe. In the future, the technology is the trading.”
Narrator, on Marc Gerstein joining as the fourth founder in 1999

“They weren’t testing what you knew. They were testing how you bet.”
Narrator, on Jane Street’s puzzle and betting-game interviews

“They got the hard part right and the easy part wrong.”
Narrator, on the roughly $300 million loss from the 2016 election trade

“To outsiders, it looks like waste. To Jane Street, it’s the whole philosophy. Survive everything, no matter the cost.”
Narrator, on the firm’s annual $50 to $75 million put option spend

“They didn’t chase crypto in crypto’s casino. They waited until crypto was wrapped inside an ETF, and the ETF is their home turf.”
Narrator, on Jane Street’s role in the 2024 spot bitcoin ETF launch

“The tail wasn’t wagging the dog. The tail was the dog.”
Narrator, on India’s options market dwarfing the stock trading underneath it

“Jane Street believes it has been doing arbitrage. SEBI is starting to believe it has been watching a crime.”
Narrator, on the regulator reconstructing the firm’s India trades minute by minute

“Jane Street prices everything on earth every second of every day. The one thing it never let the world price was itself.”
Narrator, closing the documentary

Watch the full Jane Street documentary here.

Tag: Lehman Brothers

Jane Street Explained: How a Secretive No-CEO Trading Firm Made $39.6 Billion, Trained Sam Bankman-Fried, and Ended Up in India’s Biggest Market Manipulation Case