Bloomberg深度：神秘交易巨头Jane Street的运作与400亿美元

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The fact that a company [music] anywhere in the world made more money trading than JP Morgan, then Goldman Sachs, than Citadel. I mean, it's just it's Bank of America, Croup. I I can just say honestly, it blew my mind. This is a relatively new firm and they made more money than the companies that make more money than God. And that made me want to know who they are. [music] I'm David Gura and this is the big take from Bloomberg News.

Today on the show, Bloomberg Finance reporters Max Abson and Katherine Dohy pull back the curtain on Jane Street, one of the world's biggest and most [music] secretive trading firms.

So for those that don't know Jane Street, they are today one of the largest trading firms in all of the world and especially in New York where they are based.

What kind of trading does does Jane Street do? What function do they serve in the market? Broadly,

they serve three functions. The first function is stepping in as the middleman. If you're placing a trade, it could be buying a stock, selling a ETF, there's going to be someone on the other side and that could be Jane Street. And you're you're not doing this out of the goodness of your heart. You are profiting. You are taking a fee for every trade that you are executing. And you're in many ways doing this very fast within milliseconds.

So the more trades you do, the more money you make. That's just typical breadandbut market making. The second version of market making is extending your time horizon. You are holding on to positions not for milliseconds but for minutes, hours, days, weeks. Because this is a longer time horizon. um it sometimes means big risk but also big reward. And then you have the third version which is investing in private companies.

Um and that is not typical of a marketmaking firm but it has become typical for Jane Street.

Max uh this is a proudly secretive firm. There's a lot of mystery surrounding it. Why is it that we know so little about how it operates and and who's running it? I don't think I have ever in my journalistic career um confronted uh a journalistic subject that was, you know, genuinely secretive the the way Jane Street was. You know, I think I can't remember if I ever explicitly ask Catherine like, "Okay, so who's their chief executive or like who's their chairman or like tell me about their like top executives, but it would have been a stupid question to ask because they don't have one."

If you're a a peer, if you're, you know, at a big bank or a big trading house and you call up and you say, you know, like, can you put me in touch with my counterpart? They'll they'll say no. And if you're an insider and you're like, can I see like a a partners list? They'll say no. And um if you're a journalist and you want a sense of like who's who inside of Jane Street, you kind of had a problem, which is uh was an opportunity for for Katherine and I to uh to report this piece.

Max, I would think that like LinkedIn would be your your friend here. You could go onto that social network.

Surely there's a Jane Street site within it. It would list a lot of these people.

David Gura, you simple simple man. How naive. You go you go on to LinkedIn for these very very important people and sometimes they'll have a a dot like like a period you know in their for the name

in no they'll have their name sometimes their last name sometimes just an initial but but you know for their for their job they'll have a period or um they'll just really uh it'll be really understated. I would say by and large without revealing journalistic methods too much. I I feel comfortable saying say that the the true friend true friend that we had were regulatory records.

All right. So they don't have a CEO. Um but you did find a management committee several other key players. What did you guys learn about these people in aggregate?

Jane Street has on the one hand very well-connected Republican donors and very um important Democratic donors. Now that you could say the same of big, you know, big establish established firms, but it's interesting to me that at at a at a kind of a new wave and idiosyncratic kind of intellectual group, you still have the kind of political connections we're used to seeing on Wall Street. Um, speaking of idiosyncrasy, you you have people here who have pet pot-bellied pigs.

You have um you have people here who are um interested in philanthropy, but but in a different kind. Um, are you familiar with with effective altruism?

Sure.

Um, effective altruism is um woven into the lives and careers of of several people at the firm. We had someone who was a semi- finalist in the Intel competition in high school. We had math Olympians, people who write textbooks. And I would maybe summarize what I picked up from from these people is that they're they're idiosyncratic, they're nerdy, they're prestigious, they're serious. Um and and that's a long way of saying that this is both a a very unusual but also a not entirely surprising group of serious Wall Street successes.

So broadly speaking, how did Jane Street respond? the foundation of their response to our reporting is that like this is actually a misunderstanding of Jane Street that to try to um invoke a kind of power structure uh the way that we're used to doing on Wall Street. Jane Street very specifically

basically told us, you know, not so fast. [clears throat]

So, here's what Jane Street said. Jane Street's unique structure fosters a culture of collaboration and shared accountability across our global team. While these individuals have represented the firm in various capacities, Bloomberg's own effort to create a conventional org chart fails to recognize leaders throughout the firm. [music] So, how much money are these mysterious individuals making? That's after the break.

Katherine, how rich are these employees of of Jane Street? What insight did you get into how much money they've made?

So, let's talk about the numbers. Last year, Jane Street brought in rounded up $40 billion billion.

So, in 2025, they doled out 9.38 billion in compensation and that was double the amount that they paid in 2024. So, in a year, they doubled compensation. And this is a firm that today employs, let's just call it over 3,000 employees. Think about a bank like Goldman Sachs and or JP Morgan. Those banks have trading, but they also have investment banking. They have many other ways to make money and they also have many more employees.

So if you just take the trading and the number of employees that are dedicated to the trading business ultimately over time what they've been able to do is trade more make more money with less people and the reason behind that is because a lot of their trading they've gotten really good at automation and they're using technology so that they are very nimble. Max, sticking with the the trading strategy, I I first became familiar with this firm during the Sam Bankman Freed trial, founder and head of FTX, now serving a prison sentence, but he worked at Jane Street for for a few years.

And there was this anecdote that we heard over and over again about the coin flip, these coin flip games that took place. And there was kind of an infamous one with him, heads, the world gets two times better, tales, total annihilation. And I think what he told Tyler Cowan, the economist, is I'd play every time. just a ferocious appetite for taking an extreme risk and it was presented as emblematic of the culture of risk-taking

at Jain Street. Um, how does that manifest itself just in the the way that this firm approaches investing uh today?

Yeah, Sam Bmanfrey got got a start at Jane Street. I think he was an intern and and uh worked there for a few years. My understanding of Jane Street's moneymaking is that historically they have done the work of marketmaking which I associate with um essentially matching buyers and sellers