Explosion! Top-tier quantitative giants, with an average annual salary of $18 million per employee!

How high are the salaries of employees at top quantitative giants? On May 2nd, news reported that the well-known Wall Street market maker and high-frequency trading firm Jane Street (Jane Street Capital) paid out $9.38 billion in compensation last year, more than double that of 2024.
As Jane Street surpasses many of its biggest competitors on Wall Street, this payroll expense also rises accordingly.
Based on the average number of employees, it amounts to about $2.68 million per person (equivalent to 18.29 million RMB), nearly seven times that of its competitor Goldman Sachs.
This market-making firm has grown into a giant in a key corner of the financial markets, facilitating trading of stocks, corporate bonds, exchange-traded funds (ETFs), and other assets.
Last year, the company recorded approximately $39.6 billion in trading revenue, surpassing many Wall Street investment banks and other market makers.
This payroll expenditure highlights how profitable proprietary trading has become in recent years.
Proprietary trading refers to companies trading with their own funds.
Institutions like Jane Street are continuously breaking profit records in the fiercely competitive high-speed trading market.
In finance and tech industries, proprietary trading firms are among the highest-paying early-career roles.
Graduates hired as quantitative traders are highly sought after due to their backgrounds in mathematics and programming.
Jane Street lists an annual base salary of $300k for such roles, excluding bonuses.
The company operates as a partnership, managed collectively by the partners holding equity in the firm.
Jane Street’s nearly $40 billion in trading revenue last year exceeded that of many large banks.
In comparison, JPMorgan Chase, the world’s largest bank, had a trading revenue of $35.8 billion last year.
Founded in 2000, Jane Street capitalized on the electronic transformation of financial markets and the tightening of bank regulations following the financial crisis, reshaping the trading industry along with a few other peers.
Its rise has also coincided with significant growth in stock and options markets in the US and Asia.
The firm is a major market maker across multiple asset classes, profiting from tiny price differences through computer-driven and quantitative strategies.
Additionally, Jane Street has heavily invested in AI company Anthropic and recently committed an additional $1 billion to AI cloud service provider CoreWeave.
Anthropic is currently seeking new funding rounds, with valuations possibly reaching $800 billion or more.
This market maker is known for recruiting mathematicians and puzzle enthusiasts to drive its technological systems.
Even Jane Street’s corporate structure is quite unconventional.
Rob Granieri is one of the few founders still with the company, but there is no CEO or other formal top-down management structure.
Instead, Jane Street is governed collectively by dozens of partner shareholders.
Despite facing controversies in recent years, Jane Street remains a leader.
In July last year, Indian regulators accused the firm of market manipulation while executing a once highly profitable trading strategy.
Jane Street denied these allegations.
The firm is also preparing for further expansion.
It recently proposed leasing a new office in London, with plans to double its office space in the UK capital.