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Jane Street plans to deny a knowledge of the Indian financial regulatory authority that the trading company of Wall Street is “a deliberate, well -planned and dark system” to manipulate the country’s markets.
On Friday, the India of the Securities and Exchange banned the US trade company to act in the country and claimed that it was systematic manipulated Indian bank stocks to trigger enormous payments for related derivatives. Sebi also ordered Jane Street to return more than $ 550 million to “illegal profits”.
In a memo that was sent to its approximately 3,000 employees on Sunday, Jane Street’s management said that Sebi’s “extremely inflammatory” accusations “have worked” about a formal reaction “to refute them.
“It is deeply annoying to see how the company was incorrectly characterized in this way,” said the memo, whose copy was seen by the Financial Times. “We are proud of the role that we play in the markets around the world, and it is painful that the reputation of our company is clouded by a report that is based on so many faulty or non -supported claims.”
Sebi said last week that Jane Street had 21 days to be against the order and apply for a hearing.
Jane Street is one of the largest and most successful generation of “proprietary trading companies” that have been created in the past two decades and have an enormous influence in a number of markets.
The company, based in New York, almost doubled its net trading turnover to USD 20.5 billion last year and exceeded some of the largest banks in Wall Street. In the first quarter of 2025, Jane Street achieved the net replacement of $ 7.2 billion more than Morgan Stanley.
Sebi’s examination was triggered by revelations from a lawsuit that Jane Street started against Millennium Management and two former dealers who had moved to the hedge funds last year.
Jane Street’s complaint claimed that the dealers had stolen an extremely valuable trade strategy that was later unveiled to turn the trade in Indian options.
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Sebi’s examination has so far concentrated on the trade of Jane Street with stocks, futures and options that are connected to which Banknift Indian banking stocks, but the supervisory authorities stated at the weekend that they also looked at other corners of the Indian financial markets.
Jane Street’s memo to the employees said that the Indian regulatory authority “used a metric for the effects on the market effects and the trade in aggressiveness that seems to be separated from the actual market dynamics”. It was argued that the details of his trade on January 17, 2024 – one of the days in Sebi’s report – actually “basic arbitrage trade”, a standard strategy in the industry.
The executives of Jane Street were also claimed by Sebi’s assertion that the company was expressed by the local stock exchanges, which the supervisory authority described as a justification for the sudden and unprecedented ban on the Indian activities of the trading company.
This claim felt “particularly far from reality,” said Jane Street’s Memo. The trade company said that at that time it immediately switched off its trade, “until we could better understand the concerns of the stock exchanges” and then changed its strategies to tackle their “preferences”.
“Once again we left the feeling that we had an understanding of the concerns and that they had reflected in changes in our trade behavior,” said the memo. “We have made continuous efforts since February to communicate with Sebi and were consistently rejected.”
