Aakash Gupta@aakashgupta
Jane Street made more operating profit last year than Walmart. Walmart has 2.1 million employees. Jane Street has 3,500.
That puts a market-making firm most people have never heard of at #13 on the list of America's most profitable companies. Ahead of Walmart. Ahead of Verizon. Ahead of Broadcom. Ahead of Visa.
The trading numbers are more absurd. Jane Street pulled $39.6 billion in trading revenue in 2025. JPMorgan, the largest bank in America, did $35.8 billion in trading that same year. Goldman Sachs did $31.1 billion. A private firm with no IPO and no outside capital out-traded every major investment bank on Wall Street.
Per-employee operating profit:
Walmart: $14,000
Microsoft: $564,000
Visa: $760,000
Apple: $810,000
Jane Street: $8,900,000
That's 11x Apple, 16x Microsoft, and 635x Walmart. Per head.
The mechanism is structural. Jane Street is built as an ETF market maker wrapped around an in-house technology stack written in OCaml. They quote prices on tens of thousands of securities at once, capture the spread, and hedge the residual exposure. The product they sell is liquidity. The moat is the latency and the breadth of their book.
Volatility is the fuel. When Trump rolled out tariffs in Q2 2025, ETF flows went vertical and bid-ask spreads widened across every asset class. Jane Street made $10.1 billion in that single quarter. The model assumes the counterparty has to transact under stress. Jane Street is the one calm enough to quote back.
This is also why you don't see Jane Street on a stock exchange. At $9 million per head in operating profit, the partners will never sell. There is no public valuation that lets them keep what they keep now. Going public would be a tax on themselves.
The 12 companies ranked above Jane Street on this list employ roughly 3.7 million people combined. Jane Street has 3,500.
