Jane Street’s ₹4.3-Crore IIT Offer Came Just Before SEBI’s ₹36,500-Crore Market Manipulation Bombshell
Global proprietary trading giant Jane Street Group LLC, known for its low-profile yet high-impact operations, recently found itself at the center of a massive market manipulation scandal in India. Just weeks before the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) issued a sweeping ban order, the firm made headlines for an entirely different reason — a record-breaking ₹4.3 crore annual offer to a student from IIT Madras.
The offer, which went viral, underscored Jane Street’s reputation for lucrative compensation packages and its razor-sharp focus on hiring the best quantitative minds in the world. The firm is known globally for recruiting talent from elite institutions such as MIT, Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, Oxford, and Cambridge. The IIT Madras offer marked one of the highest salary packages in recent campus recruitment history, drawing attention to Jane Street’s aggressive talent acquisition strategy in India.
However, the glamour of big paychecks was quickly overshadowed by SEBI’s allegations of a massive ₹36,500 crore market manipulation scheme. According to SEBI, Jane Street operated in India through its associate entities — JSI Investments Private Limited and JSI2 Investments Private Limited — to orchestrate trades that resulted in massive profits from options (₹43,289 crore), while deliberately incurring losses in the futures and equities segment (₹7,208 crore). The trades, SEBI alleges, were structured to manipulate the market, evade taxes, and potentially mislead other investors.
Despite the seriousness of the allegations, Jane Street has maintained its characteristic silence, staying out of the public spotlight. Known for its secretive culture and data-driven trading strategies, the firm rarely speaks to the media or comments on its operations.
As the SEBI probe unfolds, the contrast between Jane Street’s glamorous image as a dream employer for top tech talent and the alleged scale of its involvement in market misconduct has raised tough questions about transparency, ethics, and the role of global trading firms in emerging markets like India.
