Virtu Financial is a New York headquartered electronic trading firm that operates two connected businesses: market making, where it commits its own capital to quote continuous bid and offer prices and earns the spread across asset classes, and execution services, where it sells trading technology, algorithms, and analytics to institutional and retail-facing clients who route orders through its systems. The firm states it provides liquidity and competitive quotes in more than 25,000 securities and instruments across over 235 exchanges, markets, and dark pools in 36 countries, spanning equities, options, fixed income, currencies, and commodities. Within the high-frequency and electronic market-making category, Virtu differentiates itself by scale and product breadth rather than a single asset-class focus: it is one of a small number of firms that make markets simultaneously across cash equities, listed options, ETFs, FX, and fixed income on a largely automated, low-touch basis. Its client-facing Execution Services division (workflow technology, liquidity sourcing tools, and trading analytics) sits alongside the proprietary market-making book, so the firm serves both as a wholesale liquidity provider and as a vendor selling execution infrastructure to banks, brokers, and asset managers, a dual role that sets it apart from pure-play prop trading shops. Virtu was founded in 2008 by Vincent Viola, a former chairman of the New York Mercantile Exchange, together with Douglas Cifu and Graham Free. It went public on Nasdaq under the ticker VIRT on April 16, 2015, after earlier IPO attempts were delayed amid regulatory scrutiny of high-frequency trading. The firm's scale grew through two major acquisitions: KCG Holdings (the market maker formed from the 2013 merger of Knight Capital and GETCO) for roughly 1.4 billion dollars, completed July 20, 2017, and Investment Technology Group (ITG) for approximately 1 billion dollars, completed March 1, 2019. For full-year 2024, Virtu reported total revenue of about 2.88 billion dollars, net income of about 276.4 million dollars, and roughly 969 employees. Douglas Cifu served as CEO from October 2013 until his retirement in July 2025, when the board named longtime Chief Technology Officer Aaron Simons as his successor; Cifu remains an advisor to the firm. Virtu's momentum has continued into 2026: the company reported first-quarter 2026 total revenue of about 1.10 billion dollars, up roughly 31 percent year over year, with trading income of about 789 million dollars and net income of about 346.6 million dollars, and its board declared a quarterly dividend of 0.24 dollars per share. In December 2025 the firm settled an SEC investigation into customer data protection failures dating to 2018 to 2019, agreeing to pay a 2.5 million dollar penalty.
