From Bloomberg, December 6:
Alex Gerko’s London-based quant trading firm has benefited from market swings, paying out almost $1.6 billion in dividends so far this year.
The low interest rates and government stimulus that drove Wall Street’s record trading profits during the pandemic may have faded, but volatility remains high.
And that’s creating enormous fortunes.
One beneficiary has been Alex Gerko, the founder of quantitative trading firm XTX Markets. His London-based company handles almost $300 billion in daily volume across equities, commodities, currency and fixed income. It paid out a dividend of almost £1.3 billion ($1.6 billion) in March — more than triple the amount from a year earlier, according to accounts filed with Companies House.
Since 2020, more than £2 billion of those dividends have gone to a Caymans Islands-registered company controlled by Gerko, helping him build a fortune of $6 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. Both Gerko and XTX are UK tax residents.
Tim Moxon, a spokesperson for XTX, declined to comment on Gerko’s net worth.
It’s been a quick rise for Gerko, 43, who founded XTX seven years ago and owns 75% of the firm. A Russian native who’s now a British citizen, he received a doctorate in mathematics from Moscow State University. Gerko began his career trading equities at Deutsche Bank AG and later shifted to foreign exchange. He left in 2009 to join hedge fund GSA Capital before starting XTX.
The firm he built eschews discretionary traders and instead seeks to automate as many processes as possible while using statistical models that analyze “trillions of noisy observations” of data for trading. Its headquarters boasts a replica of the Apollo 11 landing capsule, along with climbing walls, arcades and sleep pods....
....MUCH MORE
He's fortunate he's not in San Francisco where the city fathers and mothers prefer you sleep on the streets:
BREAKING: San Francisco building inspectors are launching an investigation into reports Twitter has converted several office rooms at its headquarters into sleeping quarters for employees. 'We need to make sure the building is being used as intended' @sfdbi rep tells @KQEDnews
— Ted Goldberg (@TedrickG) December 6, 2022
and the interior designers at Forbes write snarky little articles, i.e.this report:
...Elon Musk’s “extremely hardcore” vision for Twitter seems to have manifested itself in sad little conference-room sleeping quarters at the company’s recently depopulated headquarters.
On Monday, employees returning to work at the company’s San Francisco location were greeted by modest bedrooms featuring unmade mattresses, drab curtains and giant conference-room telepresence monitors — a significant upgrade over the Therm-a-Rest+sleeping bag situation showcased by one Twitter employee in November. One room even has a plant....
Elsewhere in San Francisco:
