Most Wall Street trading desks would be thrilled to make $16 billion in a year. Jane Street just did it in three months.
The firm is a private trading shop. Its Q1 haul beat every big bank that trades stocks for a living. It also beat its own number from a year ago by more than two times.
Jane Street is what's called a market maker. It buys and sells thousands of stocks, ETFs, and options each second.
The firm gets paid by capturing the small price gaps between buyers and sellers. When markets move a lot, those gaps get wider.
Q1 had lots of moves. Tariff news, Fed surprises, and big swings in AI stocks kept the volume high.
Net income clocked in around $10.3 billion. That's roughly twice what the firm earned a year ago.
Total revenue ran more than 40% ahead of the same quarter last year. The firm now sits ahead of every public peer that trades for a living.
Trading is not the only thing that fueled the haul. Jane Street holds stakes in some of the biggest names in AI, including Anthropic.
When those AI firms become more valuable, the value of Jane Street's stake grows too. That paper gain showed up in Q1.
The firm has held its Anthropic stake since the AI lab's earlier funding rounds. Anthropic has raised cash at a higher value with each new round.
Each markup adds to the value of Jane Street's stake. The trading side runs on speed and scale. The AI side looks more like a long-term bet.
Right now, both are paying. The firm gets a steady win from its market making and a kicker from its AI book.
This quarter caps a year where Jane Street pulled in a record $39.6 billion in 2025. That number topped JPMorgan's full-year trading desk for the first time.
Jane Street is private. That means retail investors can't buy a slice.
The bigger story is what this tells you about Wall Street. More of the money on the trading floor goes to firms most people have never heard of.
The big banks keep getting the headlines. Firms like Jane Street keep getting the cash.
Jane Street, Citadel, and Hudson River now drive most of the daily flow in U.S. stocks and options. Banks drove that flow ten years ago. They don't anymore.
The model also leans on tech and risk teams that work more like a tech firm than a bank trading desk. That gap shows up in the numbers.
Jane Street does not publish regular numbers. The Q1 figure came from people close to the books, not from a press release.
If the firm ever opens up, those numbers would shift what we know about who really makes money on Wall Street trades. The lead it now holds over public banks gets harder to ignore each quarter.
The firm also tends to take more risk during big swings, which is why a busy quarter like Q1 lifts its results so much. The next test will be Q2, when markets settle.
