Stay informed with free updates
Simply sign up to the UK companies myFT Digest — delivered directly to your inbox.
British billionaire Alex Gerko made a record £895mn from the profits of XTX Markets last year, boosting his position as one of the UK’s richest people as his trading group continues to grow.
A pot of £1.7bn from the company’s 2025 trading profits was shared between Gerko and his quantitative traders and top tech developers, Companies House filings show. The 23 other people took home £833mn between them, an average of £36.2mn each.
Gerko’s payout is a 31 per cent increase from the year before, when he earned £683mn, and it marks another record for one of the UK’s richest people and his top team.
XTX Markets declined to comment.
XTX makes money by using vast amounts of computing power and AI processing to identify tiny margins on millions of trades. Gerko founded the London-based firm in 2015 and it has grown into one of the world’s biggest market makers, trading stocks, bonds, commodities and other assets.
Its revenues increased 44 per cent last year to £3.9bn, up from £2.7bn the year before, boosted by turbulent markets. It is building a vast data centre in Finland to manage its growing need for computing power.
The Russia-born mathematician is one of the UK’s biggest taxpayers, according to Sunday Times estimates, and in 2024 set up a family office to manage his growing wealth, named Cromulon Capital after a planet in the sci-fi show Rick and Morty that is shaped like a human head.
In June, he lost a long-running legal battle over £22.5mn-worth of tax on profits that he and other traders made when he worked at hedge fund GSA Capital, before he spun out XTX.
Gerko and his wife have set up a new maths-focused secondary school in north London, which will open in September.
The billionaire and his firm have backed AI start-ups including Anthropic and autonomous vehicle company Wayve.
XTX handles about $250bn-worth of trades a day and employs about 250 people, making it much smaller than its rivals such as Jane Street and Citadel Securities.
