Tower Research Capital LLC is a New York-based quantitative and proprietary trading firm founded in February 1998 by Mark Gorton and Alistair Brown. The firm runs systematic trading strategies across equities, futures, options and foreign exchange, executed through its own low-latency trading infrastructure, and connects to more than 150 exchanges and trading venues worldwide. Beyond its core trading book, Tower also operates an engineering arm that builds its data and research computing platforms, a liquidity provision business, and a venture investing unit, Tower Research Ventures. Tower organizes its trading operation as what it calls a "team of teams": dozens of independent trading and research pods, each run by a systematic portfolio manager who builds and owns their own strategies, while drawing on shared firm-wide infrastructure for market access, data, risk management and compliance. This pod model is built and run in-house rather than allocated to outside managers, and the firm's hiring is aimed at quantitative researchers, software engineers and systematic traders rather than outside investors; Tower trades its own capital and does not manage money for external clients. Gorton, an electrical engineer by training with degrees from Yale and Stanford and an MBA from Harvard, stepped down as chief executive in August 2019 and became chairman; Albert An, who had joined the firm in 2016 as its technology lead, succeeded him as CEO. Gorton is also known for founding the peer-to-peer file-sharing service LimeWire and the brokerage Lime Brokerage, later sold to Wedbush Securities. As of 2025 Tower employed more than 1,100 people across eleven offices, including its New York headquarters, consolidated in 2023 into a single 121,903-square-foot floor at 120 Broadway, plus Chicago, South Charleston, Montreal, London, Amsterdam, Gurgaon, GIFT City, Singapore, Hong Kong and Shanghai. In 2019 Tower agreed to pay $67.4 million, the largest penalty on record at the time for spoofing, to settle CFTC charges that three former traders placed thousands of orders in E-mini S&P 500, Nasdaq 100 and Dow futures on CME and CBOT with intent to cancel them before execution, conduct spanning March 2012 to December 2013; the firm also entered a deferred prosecution agreement with the Department of Justice over the same conduct. Separately, its subsidiary Latour Trading was fined $16 million by the SEC in 2014 for net capital rule violations. More recently, Tower has been expanding into digital assets through Limestone Trading, an internal quant group that increased its capital allocation to cryptocurrency market-making and arbitrage in Bitcoin and Ethereum during 2025 amid renewed institutional interest in the asset class, according to Bloomberg reporting; the unit employs more than fifty people across Tower's Gurgaon, Singapore, London and New York offices.
