According to foreign media reports, 46-year-old mathematician Alex Gertco has entered the ranks of Britain's top billionaires through AI-driven quantitative trading. According to the 2026 UK Rich List published by The Sunday Times, Gertco has a fortune of 1.6006 billion pounds (approximately 14.174 billion yuan) and ranks eighth, an increase of 7.261 billion pounds from 2025, with an average daily wealth growth of about 19.89 million pounds (approximately 170 million yuan) over the past year.
Gertco was born in Moscow in 1979 and holds a doctorate in mathematics from Moscow State University, with research areas including commutative algebra and homological dimension, later obtaining a master's degree in economics from the New Economic School. He worked in quantitative trading at Deutsche Bank and GSA Capital, and founded the quantitative market maker XTX Markets in 2015.
XTX Markets is driven by AI for trading and market-making, using more than 400PB of global financial market data and large-scale GPU clusters for analysis. The company has only 250 employees, without traditional human traders, and has a daily trading volume of up to 250 billion US dollars. Its AI system not only analyzes buy and sell orders of individual assets but also processes real-time data from more than 50,000 financial instruments across areas such as stocks, fixed income, foreign exchange, commodities, and cryptocurrencies to identify cross-market price patterns and support trading decisions.
XTX has no external investors, and profits are shared among a small number of partners. Gertco holds 75% of the company's shares, and his wealth growth mainly comes from the increase in the company's equity valuation. In addition to financial operations, he established Axiom Maths and the AIMO Prize, continuously investing in mathematics education and AI-related fields, and has been listed multiple times as one of the individuals with the highest tax payments in the UK.
Gertco's wealth growth reflects the commercial value of the integration of AI and quantitative finance. As data volume, computing power, and model capabilities continue to improve, the role of AI in market pricing, liquidity provision, and trading strategy optimization is becoming increasingly prominent, but its actual returns still depend on model performance, risk control, and market conditions.
