Diamond: Jane Street Capital
With the tiny fingers of President Donald Trump holding the tiller, there’s never going to be a shortage of volatility in the market, and the big beasts of Wall Street’s trading desks have been lapping it up.
From the comfort of their new $4bn HQ at 270 Park Avenue, JPMorgan’s traders notched up a healthy $35.8bn of revenue last year, while Goldman Sachs managed $31bn and Morgan Stanley chipped in $24.3bn; but they were all beaten to the gold medal position by Jane Street.
After an astonishing final quarter that generated $15.5bn, the plucky upstart managed total net revenues for the year of $39.6bn, up from $20.4bn the previous year and about $10bn in 2023.
Jane Street maintained a low profile for a couple of decades after it was founded in 2000, but, when Covid struck, its trading revenues went through the roof, and it was no longer possible to hide the sheer tsunami of cash that its money-making machine was generating.
Jane Street has played a huge role in the development of the exchange traded fund market, and it is unusual in having made significant investments in sectors such as AI.
Its earnings were significantly boosted by mark-to-market gains in its investments in companies such as Anthropic, and it has announced a $1bn commitment to data centre provider CoreWeave, along with a $6bn commitment to use the platform.
It retains an unusual structure, with no CEO and no formal job titles, but as long as the money keeps flowing, nobody’s complaining.
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Dog: Tottenham Hotspur
As English football’s Premier League season lumbers towards its conclusion, there is a brutal realisation that the odd point here or there can mean the difference of a couple of hundred million quid in revenue.
The race is on to see who will join Wolves and Burnley in the drop to the second-tier Championship and, much to the horror of their long-suffering supporters, Spurs are languishing in the final relegation spot.
Three points against Wolves was the first win of 2026 for Spurs, and it prevented them from breaking the only record they looked likely to achieve this season, coming up just short of the 16 games without a win that the club managed back in 1935.
This is an astonishing situation for the ninth-largest club in the world by revenue to find itself in, despite its state-of-the-art £1bn stadium and £629m spent on new players in the past three years.
Relegation would see revenue drop from the £565m achieved in financial 2025 to somewhere close to the £300m mark, and it would take a significant chunk out of the value of the club as a whole.
Players who are used to plying their trade at Old Trafford or Anfield might not be overly excited at the prospect of a wet weekend in Stoke, and the club is clearly a long way from qualifying for football in Europe, where they won the Europa League a mere two years ago.
Such a high-profile relegation could also depress club valuations across the board, with US investors in particular spooked by the concept that such a fate could befall their prized asset.
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