XTX Markets Brand Guidelines: A 2015 GSA Spin-Off, Machine Forecasts and Kajaani

Machine forecasts from London.

XTX Markets is an algorithmic trading firm based in London. English Wikipedia says it was founded in January 2015 by Alexander Gerko as a spin-off from GSA Capital, and that he now leads it as co-chief executive alongside Hans Buehler. Its British trading company, XTX Markets Limited, became an investment firm authorised by the Financial Conduct Authority in July 2016, Wikipedia says.

The firm describes its work as a single chain. It says it uses machine learning to produce price forecasts for more than 53,000 financial instruments across equities, fixed income, currencies, commodities and crypto, then uses those forecasts to trade on exchanges and alternative venues and to offer liquidity directly to clients around the world. Its home page states that it does not deal with individual investors, does not accept deposits and offers no retail trading. Finland’s public broadcaster Yle reported in January 2025 that the company has no human brokers and that every trade is made by machine.

Expansion came quickly. English Wikipedia dates the opening of a US office to September 2017 and the registration of its first US broker-dealer, XTX Markets LLC, to December 2017. In January 2018 the firm moved its London headquarters to the R7 building at King’s Cross, and in October 2018, following Brexit, it chose Paris as its European base, where XTX Markets SAS trades European equities and futures. In September 2020 The TRADE reported that XTX had released an FX execution algorithm for buy-side clients, offered through a web interface and an API and designed to reduce slippage on large orders. In February 2021 it launched XTX Direct, a single-dealer platform for US equities, Wikipedia says.

Europe’s market rules shaped part of that growth. In January 2018, as the MiFID II rules came into force, XTX began the process of becoming a systematic internaliser in UK and EU equities, to provide liquidity to clients there, English Wikipedia says. The same article reports that in 2018 the firm took a stake in Aquis Exchange and set up a foreign-exchange pricing engine in Singapore in conjunction with the Monetary Authority of Singapore.

Data centres in Kajaani.

Computing sits at the centre of how XTX presents itself. Its website claims “an unrivalled level of computational resources in the trading industry” and a growing research cluster, and says its teams include researchers, developers and technologists with backgrounds in pure mathematics, programming, physics, computer science and machine learning. It puts its headcount at about 300, the same figure English Wikipedia gives for 2026.

That focus has taken the firm to northern Finland. Yle reported on 22 January 2025 that XTX was building its first data centre of its own in Kajaani, a site of about 15,000 square metres due for completion in 2026, and planned four more on the same plot. The company told Yle it needed its own centres because its AI work would soon require more computing power than it could rent from outside providers, and said it intended to give away the waste heat. The Finnish builder YIT said in September 2026 that it is delivering three data centres for XTX in Kajaani: the first agreed in 2024, the second announced in 2025 and the third in July 2026, with the fit-out of the third due to start in late 2026.

In January 2025 Yle listed the firm’s offices as London, Singapore, New York, Paris, Bristol, Mumbai, Yerevan and Kajaani. Its venture arm, XTX Ventures, announced in November 2020, invests in early-stage companies driven by machine learning, according to English Wikipedia.

Trading firms in public.

Proprietary trading firms and electronic market makers sell little to the public, so their identities are built for a narrow audience: the students, engineers and researchers they hope to hire, and the institutions they trade with. Their websites read less like consumer marketing and more like careers sites, with pages on departments, open roles, interviewing and benefits placed as prominently as any description of the business.

Recruiting shapes the tone. Jane Street, for example, keeps a Puzzles page that posts a new problem every month or two, and its events include meet-ups built around puzzles and technical talks. Coding challenges, internship programmes and scholarships do similar work, signalling that the firm values problem solving before it values a finance background.

The trading floor is the other recurring image. Firms describe offices in several financial centres and present their floors as places of shared work rather than private desks, while technology pages talk about low-latency networks, compilers and research. Blogs and podcasts carry much of the explanation, letting engineers and researchers speak for the firm instead of an advertising campaign.

The marks themselves tend to be modest: a plain name, a simple geometric symbol or a word set in capitals, used consistently across careers pages, legal notices and the regulated subsidiaries that carry the brand in each market. For designers, the category is a study in restraint, where credibility comes from clarity, consistency and a careful choice of tone rather than from colour or spectacle. The palettes in these guides are our own unofficial interpretations.

Mathematics as a cause.

Outside trading, XTX gives to mathematics. Its website says that since 2020 it has committed money to charities and good causes across education, science and global development, with mathematics as the principal focus: helping more students go on to degrees and PhDs, especially those from lower-income backgrounds, and funding research. English Wikipedia names the firm as the founding donor of the Maths Excellence Fund, the Martingale Foundation and the Observatory for Mathematical Education.

Its most public maths project is a prize. In November 2023 the firm launched the Artificial Intelligence Mathematical Olympiad Prize, or AIMO, a challenge fund meant to spur a publicly shared AI model able to win a gold medal at the International Mathematical Olympiad, run in partnership with Kaggle, English Wikipedia says. In December 2024 XTX and Renaissance Philanthropy launched the AI for Math Fund to support new AI tools for mathematics, and in June 2022 the firm announced an Academic Sanctuaries Fund to create places for students and researchers forced to flee the war in Ukraine.

The firm meets the public mainly through recruitment, a technology blog and its giving. Its website, at xtxmarkets.com, is organised around careers, philanthropy, ventures, clients and news, with a short statement for retail investors near the top.

For a design guide, XTX Markets shows how a young trading firm can make its computing and its support for mathematics the core of its public face. Compare Flow Traders and Jane Street, two other electronic trading firms in this series. For this guide we use a deep violet, a moss green and a pale lilac grey with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep XTX Markets’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.