Ananth Narayan vs Jane Street: How India’s quiet market cop landed a billion-dollar blow

Ananth Narayan doesn’t look like someone who rattles Wall Street giants. Measured, soft-spoken, and unfailingly methodical, he’s more professor than enforcer. But in July, the 56-year-old regulator signed off on a 105-page order that stunned global markets, accusing the ultra-secretive Jane Street Group of market manipulation in India.

Narayan was at the helm of a months-long investigation that led India’s Securities and Exchange Board (SEBI) to allege that Jane Street made over ₹48.4 billion ($560 million) in unlawful gains by influencing the country’s stock and futures markets to benefit its options trades. 

The order zeroed in on a single date—Jan. 17, 2024, Jane Street’s most profitable day in two years—and accused the firm of timing its trades to swing the Nifty Bank Index before unloading bearish bets.

At the heart of the crackdown, a Bloomberg report says, is Narayan’s rare combination of market fluency and regulatory clarity. 

Before joining SEBI in 2022, he spent two decades trading currencies, swaps, and options at Citigroup, Deutsche Bank, and Standard Chartered. In an industry where enforcement often lags understanding, Narayan had both—and used it to decode Jane Street’s playbook.

“Only a markets guy could have understood these trades,” a former colleague was quoted as saying in the report. Under his direction, SEBI formed a cross-functional team that mapped thousands of trades—minute by minute—to establish a pattern of price movements tied to Jane Street’s options exposure.

The revelations are more than technical. They mark a shift in how India polices its fast-growing financial markets. Narayan, an IIT Bombay and IIM Lucknow alumnus, had watched from the inside as retail investors piled into derivatives and lost big—91% of them, by SEBI’s own data. For him, this wasn’t just about Jane Street—it was about market integrity.

Inside his Mumbai office, a whiteboard reportedly bears the handwritten reminder: “First, do no harm.” But as Bloomberg notes, for Narayan, the real harm lay in letting unchecked complexity fester unchallenged.

Jane Street has denied the charges and parked the alleged profits in escrow. But the fight is far from over. SEBI’s inquiry is expanding to other indexes, and legal challenges are likely.

Still, in a sector where firms rarely face heat, Narayan has done the unthinkable: he called the bluff—and made the house flinch.