JP Morgan made between $250 and $300 million from the Swiss franc's tumultuous move earlier this month, according to Bloomberg's Julia Verlaine.

The currency moved violently after the Swiss National Bank announced that it would depeg it from the euro. Major banks like Citigroup and Deutsche Bank each lost around $150 million in the fallout.

Hedge funds were wiped out including Everest Capital's $830 million Global Fund.

FXCM — the largest US retail currency brokerage — had to be rescued from bankruptcy by a $300 million loan deal with Leucadia.

In short, there was a lot of drama.

For its part, the Swiss National Bank said that it no longer had any choice in the matter. The SNB had been holding its currency down for three years, keeping it at a 1:1 ration with a euro. That policy, however, was getting costly — to the tune of $100 billion monthly.

"In the days running up to the decision to abolish the ceiling the sum ploughed in was increasing," Fritz Zurbruegg, a member of the Swiss National Bank's governing board, told Switzerland's Blick newspaper.



He said that because it was going to cost the SNB $116 billion in January: "We came to the conclusion that the best option was to free up the exchange rate."



The thing is, usually central banks communicate even the most incremental changes over months, sometimes years. They give the market clues so that banks, funds, and other investors are prepared for significant moves. The SNB's decision was sudden and incredibly significant in market terms. Once it stopped holding down the Swiss franc, it shot up moving its ratio to the euro from 1:1 to more than 1:1.10 in no time at all.

But again, there are two sides to every trade, so when there are losers there must also be winner. In the hedge fund space, Brevan Howard, Quaesta Capital Management, Rubicon Global and Lynx Asset Management all came out on top.

It's also worth noting that Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs said the move didn't really impact them at all.

So it looks like JP Morgan owned this one.