Jane Street

Jane Street

Jane Street was founded in 2000 by a small group of traders and technologists including Tim Reynolds and Rob Granieri, who remains CEO. The firm originated on a single desk in a former commodities-trading office at 55 Water Street. From that start, Jane Street evolved into one of the world's largest proprietary market-makers, trading equities, ETFs, bonds, currencies, options, and crypto across more than 200 venues in 45 countries. The firm's core business is electronic liquidity provision — continuously quoting two-sided prices across global markets and collecting the spread. Its ETF trading desk alone handles over $17 billion in notional volume daily, according to a Bloomberg analysis from 2024. Jane Street's trading spans listed options, futures, government bonds, and corporate credit. In 2018 the firm became one of the earliest traditional market-makers to commit capital to crypto spot and derivatives markets, a business that has since grown to a material share of overall revenue. The firm systematically internalizes order flow, netting opposing trades before interacting with public exchanges. Jane Street operates from offices in New York, London, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Amsterdam, with approximately 2,600 employees as of 2024. The firm famously hires programmers, mathematicians, and physicists rather than traditional finance graduates, and runs an intensive multi-month classroom training program for every new trader. In May 2024, the firm surpassed a record $12 billion in annual net trading revenue, as the boom in options and ETF volumes accelerated across its core markets (per Bloomberg, July 2024). The firm remains a private partnership, distributing profits to its roughly 40–50 partners and reinvesting the rest. Jane Street is structurally unusual among large trading firms for its commitment to open-source tooling. It is the primary corporate steward of the OCaml programming language, maintaining the compiler toolchain and releasing internal libraries as open source. This creates a flywheel: academic OCaml communities produce graduates trained in the firm's preferred tools, and the public releases pressure-test the firm's own infrastructure. No external LPs, no fund structures, no client money — the firm trades strictly proprietary capital, which eliminates any conflict between market-making duties and asset-management obligations.