Quant Trader Doubles Fortune to $11 Billion as XTX Profit Surges; XTX Holdings paid a record £1.6 billion dividend in April; Gerko now almost as wealthy as Millennium's Izzy Englander Benjamin Stupples and Tom Maloney - Bloomberg A former Deutsche Bank AG trader is rapidly amassing enough wealth in the fallout from volatile interest rates and inflation to rival some of the richest billionaires in finance. Alex Gerko's fortune has surged to $10.8 billion after the holding company of his quantitative trading firm XTX Markets paid out a record £1.6 billion ($2 billion) dividend to its owners earlier this year. XTX also increased profits more than 50%, helping to roughly double the 43-year-old's net worth, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. /jlne.ws/3OLKwOq Quant Trader Doubles Fortune to $11 Billion as XTX Profit Surges XTX Holdings paid a record £1.6 billion dividend in April Gerko now almost as wealthy as Millennium’s Izzy Englander Alex Gerko Photographer: Rahul Singh/XTX Markets Ltd. In this Article XTX MARKETS LTD Private Company DEUTSCHE BANK-RG 9.83EUR –0.09% Have a confidential tip for our reporters? Get in Touch Before it’s here, it’s on the Bloomberg Terminal LEARN MORE By Benjamin Stupples and Tom Maloney August 21, 2023 at 7:11 AM CDT A former Deutsche Bank AG trader is rapidly amassing enough wealth in the fallout from volatile interest rates and inflation to rival some of the richest billionaires in finance. Alex Gerko’s fortune has surged to $10.8 billion after the holding company of his quantitative trading firm XTX Markets paid out a record £1.6 billion ($2 billion) dividend to its owners earlier this year. XTX also increased profits more than 50%, helping to roughly double the 43-year-old’s net worth, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. Gerko, who controls a majority stake in XTX, is now the world’s 182nd-richest person, with his fortune rivaling those of hedge fund founders Izzy Englander and Stan Druckenmiller. Tim Moxon, a spokesperson for London-based XTX, declined to comment on Gerko’s net worth. Gerko’s swift ascent among the world’s ultra-rich positions him as an increasingly influential figure in markets. XTX handles almost $300 billion in daily volume across equities, commodities, currency and fixed-income markets. His booming fortune has already earned him the title of the UK’s biggest taxpayer and helped him fund donations to educational initiatives worldwide. XTX’s three main UK operating entities reported combined profits of about £1.1 billion in 2022 as revenue surged 70% to £2.5 billion, registry filings show. Rival market-making firm Citadel Securities booked $7.5 billion in net trading revenues in the same period, up 7.1% from 2021. Big Finance Fortunes XTX founder Alex Gerko's wealth is booming Source: Bloomberg Billionaires Index Note: selected individuals shown; data as of Aug. 18, 2023 The haul allowed XTX to pay out most of its record dividend in April to a Cayman Islands-based entity that Gerko controls. Gerko, a Russian native, is a British citizen and UK tax resident. He began his career trading equities at Deutsche Bank before later shifting to foreign exchange. He left in 2009 to join hedge fund GSA Capital, where he led currency trading operations before XTX was spun out in early 2015. The firm he built takes its name from a mathematical formula used in its trading algorithms and seeks to automate as many processes as possible while using statistical models that analyze “trillions of noisy observations.” Gerko is co-chief executive officer of XTX alongside former JPMorgan Chase & Co. executive Hans Buehler, who joined the firm last year, while Deutsche Bank veteran Zar Amrolia is chairman.
If anyone is interested, XTX refers to X'X (transpose(X) * X) or the SSCP (sum squares cross product) matrix used in Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) regression, and, probably, its inverse, X'X^-1, or the "precision matrix." Particularly, real-time low-rank updates thereto without accumulating numerical error might pose a difficult problem in HFT.
At their web site they say that their firm "XTX Markets" is an algorithmic trading company for institutionals omly (ie. not for retail traders), and they list these items: " - 190 PETABYTES OF USABLE STORAGE - 4 PETABYTES OF RAM - 12000 TOP-END GPU'S IN OUR RESEARCH CLUSTER - 5.42 MEGAWATTS OF RENEWABLY SOURCED POWER - 250 BILLION USD DAILY TRADING VOLUME " Destination Sing Sing, IMO...