Meet Alex Gerko, the mathematician who turned AI-powered trading into billion-dollar empire

Gerko founded London-based XTX Markets in 2015, creating a quantitative trading company that now executes around US$250 billion in transactions every day. Using advanced mathematics, machine learning and high-performance computing, the firm predicts price movements and automatically trades more than 50,000 financial instruments, including stocks, bonds, currencies, commodities and cryptocurrencies.

Today, XTX is one of the world's largest market makers and proprietary trading firms, employing about 250 people across London, Paris, Singapore and New York.

The company recorded its strongest year on record in 2024, generating a profit pool of £1.28 billion (US$1.7 billion). Gerko received roughly £682.5 million, while the rest was distributed among the firm's top quantitative researchers.

The firm's rapid growth has made Gerko, 46, one of Britain's wealthiest people. He owns roughly 75% of XTX, giving him an estimated net worth of $11.8 billion as of June 26, Forbes reported.

Last year he paid £331.4 million in taxes, making him the UK's second-largest taxpayer behind the owners of gambling company Betfred, according to The Sunday Times.

Alex Gerko, founder of XTX Markets. Photo from LinkedIn

Gerko grew up in one of Moscow's poorer suburbs, where his talent for mathematics became his path to success. After earning a PhD in mathematics from Moscow State University, he joined Deutsche Bank in 2004, first trading equities before moving into foreign exchange. He relocated to London with Deutsche Bank in 2006 and joined British hedge fund GSA Capital three years later.

In 2015, he left to launch XTX Markets as a spinout from GSA, naming the company after a mathematical formula. The firm's London headquarters houses a replica of the Apollo 11 spacecraft's command module alongside an authentic 1943 Enigma encryption machine, the German device cracked by codebreakers including British mathematician Alan Turing.

Unlike traditional investment firms, XTX does not rely on human traders to make buy and sell decisions.

Instead, its employees, the math whizzes nicknamed the "kings of the geek world," oversee thousands of algorithms powered by deep learning, a form of AI that uses neural networks, computer programs modeled on the human brain, to identify complex patterns and predict price movements from milliseconds to several hours ahead, according to The Times.

The system is powered by 25,000 graphics processing units, the chips behind today's AI boom, giving XTX "an unrivalled level of computational resources in the trading industry." Some of the firm's strategies focus on market making, buying and selling financial assets while earning the difference between bid and offer prices. Others identify temporary market distortions and bet that prices will eventually return to normal levels.

The company is doubling down on AI.

This year, XTX is expected to begin operating the first of five planned data centers in Finland, where the cool climate helps keep its computers from overheating, as part of a complex expected to cost more than $1 billion. Its new Finland data center covers an area equivalent to three football fields, with a second facility next door expected to come online in 2027.

"The approach they seem to be taking is kind of a big, all-in bet on deep learning," Agustin Lebron, senior researcher at EquiLibre Technologies, a trading firm in Prague, Czech Republic, told the Wall Street Journal.

XTX's U.K. business reported a 44% increase in revenue to $5.3 billion last year, while profit rose 33% to $2.3 billion, according to company filings. The figures exclude the firm's Singapore unit, whose 2025 financial results have not yet been released despite previously generating revenue comparable to its U.K. operations.

While rivals such as Citadel Securities and Jane Street earn more, XTX runs a far leaner operation, employing about 250 people instead of thousands. Because the firm has no outside investors, its profits are shared among a small group of partners, with Gerko, who owns some 75% of XTX, receiving the largest share.

Building a legacy beyond finance

Former employees describe Gerko as a demanding and highly involved manager who is constantly active on the company's internal messaging channels. Outside work, however, he keeps his personal life largely private.

He and his Russian-born wife, Elena, a former economist at the Bank of England, have three children. The family reportedly lives in a London townhouse and also owns a 150-acre estate in the countryside of the Chiltern Hills.

Gerko became a British citizen in 2016 and renounced his Russian citizenship in 2022.

Although he rarely discusses his personal life publicly, he remains active on LinkedIn, where he shares his views on financial markets and other issues, making him an unusually vocal figure in the typically secretive world of computerized trading.

As a philanthropist, he has increasingly focused his wealth on promoting mathematics education and supporting young researchers.

He and Elena founded the children's charity Axiom Maths in 2022. Another project, the 1729 Maths School, is set to open in London this September for mathematically gifted students. The school is named after the Hardy-Ramanujan number, made famous by British mathematician G. H. Hardy and Indian mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan. It is the smallest number that can be expressed as the sum of two cubes in two different ways.

Last November, Gerko, who has frequently criticized cuts to mathematics funding in the U.K., announced that XTX would donate £26.37 million to fund more than 100 PhD and postdoctoral research positions in pure mathematics at universities across the country, according to the Financial Times.

"I retained my interest in math education because this was the path from, let’s say, an underprivileged background to a very lucrative career," Gerko said in 2023.