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UK-based market maker XTX reports a 54% increase in profits in 2024.
Applications to UK regulatory authorities last week and documents seen by the Financial Times show that post-tax company profits rose to £1.3 billion from £835 million the previous year, with revenues rising 36% to £2.7 billion.
Founded in London 10 years ago, XTX has created co-founder Alex Gerko, who has become one of the UK’s most profitable private companies and owns about a quarter of the company, one of the UK’s wealthiest people.
In March, a subsidiary of XTX Markets Technologies paid a dividend of £404 million to a holding company managed by Gerko. XTX declined to comment on the submission.
The group has managed to capture the majority of trade businesses historically run through major banks, leveraging waves of innovation that have taken the market since the 2008 financial crisis, allowing rivals such as XTX, Citadel Securities, Virtu Financial and Tower Research to capture the bulk of the trade business that has historically been carried out through major banks.
XTX uses vast amounts of computing power to detect anomalies and patterns in prices across currencies, debt, stocks, commodities and crypto markets. It estimates it handles approximately $250 billion per day trading volume in the global market.
It mainly owns Nvidia chips, and over 25,000 AI chips, making it one of the chip manufacturer’s largest corporate customers.
XTX said in January it would invest 1 billion euros in its own Finland data centre after growing lease options. The centre’s first building, which will be operational since 2026, will manage 22.5MW of computing power.
Scandinavian countries have become a popular location for data centres as their cheap electricity and climate mean that they are expensive and low in power to keep their servers cool. Last year, Google said it was building a 240MW data center in Norway.