XTX Markets: 2 + 2 = $1-gazillion
The unprecedented volatility in the markets may have caught some traders with their trousers down, but not so much Alex Gerko and his team of uber-boffins at XTX Markets.
Gerko notched up a shiny PhD in mathematics at Moscow State University before arriving in London in 2006. Nine years later he got bored with making money for other people and set up XTX, whose name, as any fule kno, contains some sort of insider reference to linear regression.
Fortunately, you don’t need to understand how its algorithms work to appreciate its performance, with revenues up 44% in 2025 to £3.9bn and profits after tax up 33% to £1.7bn, the lion’s share of which went straight into Gerko’s ever-expanding piggy bank.
The firm explains that its state-of-the-art machine learning technology produces price forecasts for more than 50,000 financial instruments, which it then trades to around $250bn a day. It’s a lean operation with a mere 250 employees and it has become a significant philanthropic donor, largely in the field of maths.
Gerko regularly stands on the Britain’s-biggest-individual-taxpayer podium, and 2025’s bumper performance could well put him back in the gold medal position. He renounced his Russian citizenship in 2022 and has stuck his head over the parapet with criticism of the invasion of Ukraine, so it seems unlikely that he’ll be popping back to Moscow to revisit childhood haunts any time soon.
By any standards, however, it’s been a remarkable success story and a tribute to how outstanding talent in one field can reap rewards in another.
Chelsea FC Holdings: The Blues in the red
The Stamford Bridge faithful have long been trying to persuade us that blue is the colour, and it may well describe how Chelsea’s shareholders are feeling after the club racked up the biggest pre-tax loss in English Premier League history. Revenues improved to £490.9m for the year ended June 2025, the second highest the club has ever achieved, but this wasn’t enough to prevent losses ballooning to £262.4m.
It all seems a long way from the glory days of the Chelski era, when Roman Abramovich was grinning away in the directors’ box before choppering off to whichever of his superyachts caught his eye on that particular day.
The charismatic oligarch has been replaced by Todd Boehly and the suits of Clearlake Capital, whom the average denizen of the Matthew Harding stand would struggle to pick out of a police lineup.
Performance under the new owners hasn’t exactly resulted in a huge amount of work for the chap in charge of opening the trophy cabinet, with last year’s Club World Cup and the European Conference League the only additions.
The financial losses haven’t been the result of an investment in players, with the club making a profit of £57.9m on the transfer market last year.
There’s certainly been no shortage of managers since the Boehly consortium took over; six have occupied the hot seat since 2022. But performance remains lacklustre, and with the team sitting at sixth in the Premier League, participation in the Champions League next season is distinctly unlikely.
For the time being the club is compliant with the Football Association’s profit and sustainability rules, but that may become an issue in future.
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