Tower Research Capital

Mark Gorton, the founder and CEO, oversees the firm's overall strategy and risk framework. Day-to-day trading decisions are decentralized across multiple independent trading teams, each managing a separate strategy book with its own P&L. This structure gives individual team leads significant autonomy within centrally enforced risk limits.

Tower is primarily a proprietary trading firm. It does, however, manage limited external capital through Tower Research Capital Investments, a subsidiary that offers managed accounts to qualified investors. The firm's core operations remain focused on deploying the firm's own capital.

Tower trades globally across equities, futures, options, currencies, and fixed income. Its strategies operate in North America, Europe, and Asia. The firm's systematic models target short-term dislocations and liquidity opportunities across these markets using fully automated execution.

Tower operates through a decentralized, multi-team model. Individual trading groups function like internal startups, each developing and running proprietary quantitative strategies. These teams share a centralized technology platform, data infrastructure, and compliance framework, but maintain independence over their specific strategies and P&Ls.

Mark Gorton holds degrees from Stanford and MIT in engineering and computer science. Before Tower, he created LimeWire, a widely used peer-to-peer file-sharing application. This technology background shaped Tower's architecture, which emphasizes distributed systems, algorithmic execution, and low-latency infrastructure.

Tower Research Capital has faced regulatory scrutiny. In October 2023, the firm agreed to pay a civil monetary penalty to the CFTC to settle charges related to historical trading activity. The settlement did not require the firm to admit or deny the findings. Tower maintains that it has since enhanced its compliance and surveillance infrastructure.

No. Tower remains a privately held firm fully controlled by founder Mark Gorton. It has not raised external equity or brought in institutional shareholders. This ownership structure keeps governance concentrated and aligns risk-taking with Gorton's personal appetite for quantitative strategy development.