Last year, Jane Street Group LLC made over $2.3 billion from trading equity derivatives in India. That’s a big jump compared to 2023. This shows how important India has become for the company’s global business. Jane Street is based in New York, and in 2024, India made up more than 10% of its total $20.5 billion in global trading income.
This success has caught the attention of Indian regulators. The Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) is now looking into Jane Street’s trades. Some people in the market believe the company may have tried to influence prices. Bloomberg recently reported this. SEBI’s investigation is still going on.
At the same time, the National Stock Exchange (NSE) also looked into Jane Street. That case was closed last month after the firm’s trading partner in India responded to the exchange.
Jane Street has not made any public comments about its earnings in India or the ongoing investigation.
India has now become a key player for the trading companies. As in the past few years, companies like Citadel Securities and Optiver have entered the Indian market. Due to the increase in options trading, which has drawn in many new investors, especially retail investors.
Between 2020 and 2025, the premiums of trading options in India – grew more than 11 times. This rise helped many foreign trading companies to earn a good junk of profit from the Indian market.
As per the SEBI report, these companies earned around $7 billion in total profits in just one year, ending March 2024.
Jane Street was one of the big winners. Last year, during a court case with another trading company, Millennium Management, Jane Street’s lawyers accidentally disclosed that the firm made $1 billion in 2023 by using a secret strategy to trade Indian options.
It looks like the smart trading system used by the company is paying off. Also Jane Street uses its own money, so they don’t need to follow the same banking rules as traditional firms. This provides them with more freedom and trading speed.
Jane Street also owns more than 2% share of the entire derivatives trading market in 18 countries — including India, as per the reports. The company has been making a lot of profit using their in build smart trading software’s.
But this year, things have started to slow down. The options market in India is not growing as fast as before. From January to April 2025, the fees collected from options trades on the NSE went up only 2%. This is a huge drop compared to the same period last year, when the growth was 92%.
The slowdown happened because SEBI introduced new rules in November. These rules were meant to protect small investors, most of whom lose money in options trading — around 90%, according to reports. The new rules made it harder for people to trade by increasing the minimum amount needed to invest and making the size of trades larger. This made retail investors to think twice before entering a trade.
Despite the slowdown, India remains a valuable market for global trading companies. As it has one of the busiest derivatives markets in the world when measured by the number of contracts traded. This makes it a key spot for global firms that specialize in high speed trading and money making.
For now, Jane Street continues to be one of the top players in India’s trading scene. But with new rules and ongoing investigations, the road ahead may not be as smooth as it was last year. Still, its massive earnings show how powerful and effective its trading methods have been at least up until now.
