Jane Street's $5 BILLION SCANDAL

The story of Jane Street's origin is nothing short of a screenplay about a heist.

- PALAK SHAH

It is a tale of Quant Kings, a Glitzy Facade and Market Manipulation. Add to this a screaming indictment of the regulatory failures of the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) in India's retail wealth drain. Jane Street's alleged manipulation, supercharged by its 30 per cent market share and tactics like 'Extended Marking the Close', has exposed deep vulnerabilities in India's markets

TUCKED AWAY IN MANHATTAN'S financial jungle, behind unassuming glass doors, lurks Jane Street Capital - a Wall Street phantom that doesn't just play the markets but twists them with surgical precision. Founded in 2000 by a quartet of razor-sharp minds - Michael Jenkins, Tim Reynolds, Rob Granieri and Marc Gerstein - this secretive quant shop began as a scrappy upstart, wielding bleeding-edge algorithms to dominate high-frequency trading (HFT). By 2025, it had morphed into a global colossus, reportedly raking in $20.5 billion in revenue, outpacing Wall Street's mightiest hedge funds. Its crown jewel? A billion-dollar strategy for milking India's derivatives market - a wild west of options and futures where Jane Street played puppet master.

That is, until 4 July, 2025, when India's market regulator, the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI), dropped a bombshell, banning the firm for allegedly manipulating trades worth Rs 45,000 crore ($5 billion). This is the tale of a clandestine empire, its enigmatic overlord, and a heist that exposed India's financial underbelly. It is a tale of the Rise of a Quant Dynasty, in which Jane Street's story of origin is pure financial noir - a tale of ambition and secrecy woven into Wall Street's fabric. Its founders, poached from the elite trading firm Susquehanna International Group (SIG) in Philadelphia, were math prodigies with a singular vision, to harness algorithms to outsmart markets.