A London algorithmic trading firm run by billionaire Alex Gerko faced a corporation tax bill of more than £500m last year, the firm’s latest accounts show, making the company one of the largest individual contributors to the exchequer.
Kings Cross-based XTX Markets was due to pay around £580m in corporation tax for 2025, according to a City AM analysis of corporate filings, an increase of more than a third compared to the previous year after a surge in profitability.
The UK government collected £89.2bn in onshore corporation tax receipts in the 2025 tax year, according to data from HMRC, meaning XTX alone accounts for around 0.7 per cent of all corporation tax collected in the UK, despite having fewer than 200 full-time staff.
XTX’s tax payments would be more than enough to cover an entire day of the costs of running the NHS, which amounts to around £520m.
The bumper tax bill comes after a period of soaring growth for XTX, which reported a 44 per cent jump in revenue to just shy of £4bn, with profit rising by a third to £1.7bn.
The company, which was founded by Gerko in 2015 and uses machine learning to forecast prices across a range of asset classes and financial instruments, has been a major beneficiary of the volatility across financial markets over the past year.
The firm uses tens of thousands of GPUs, or graphics processing units, to analyse market data, and is thought to have one of the biggest clusters of high-end Nvidia chips in the world.
XTX has been named as a finalist in the 2026 City AM awards after being shortlisted in the category of most innovative company of the year.
Gerko, a Russian-born trader who renounced his citizenship from the country in 2022, has attracted a cult following in the City, having become well-known for his acerbic, unvarnished commentary on LinkedIn. “Living in [the] UK [the] last 2.5 years is a radicalising experience,” he wrote in February.
Aside from taxes paid, the company is also one of the UK’s biggest charitable donors, having committed more than £150m to charities and good causes in 2025.
XTX said its “philanthropic focus is on maths education and research, with an aim to support more students to progress to degrees and PhDs, and to accelerate breakthrough discoveries, particularly in pure maths and artificial intelligence.”
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