Citadel Securities


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Citadel Securities
Founded	2002
Headquarters	Miami, Florida
Key People	Peng Zhao, CEO; Ken Griffin, Founder
Products	Market making
Website	https://www.citadelsecurities.com/

Citadel Securities is a leading global market maker for a wide array of fixed income and equity products. It is the U.S.'s biggest equity and options market maker.^[1] Its automated equities platform trades more than 20% of U.S. equities volume across more than 11,000 U.S.-listed securities, and it trades over 16,000 OTC securities. It executes approximately 35% of all U.S.-listed retail volume.

The firm generated a record $12.2 billion in trading revenue in 2025, up 25% from 2024.^[2]

Citadel Securities is a separate entity from the hedge fund Citadel LLC, although both were founded by Ken Griffin.

History[edit]

Citadel Securities traces its origins to the broader Citadel organization founded by Ken Griffin in the early 1990s, which built quantitative trading and risk management capabilities across multiple asset classes. Citadel began its operations in 1990 with roughly $4.6 million in capital, which largely came from the founder of Glenwood, Frank Meyer.^[3] The market-making unit that would become Citadel Securities emerged in the early 2000s as Citadel expanded from a hedge fund into a firm active in providing liquidity and trade execution services to external counterparties, initially focusing on U.S. equity and listed options markets. ^[4]

During the 2000s and early 2010s, Citadel Securities grew into one of the largest wholesale market makers in U.S. equities.^[5]

In September 2015 Citadel Securities launched a European fixed-income market-making business, continuing its challenge to bank dominance of trading in government debt and derivatives. Citadel intended to use this as a first step to build a broader European trading business. It will initially offer to trade swaps denominated in US dollars to European customers during local trading hours.^[6]

In January 2017, Citadel Securities agreed to pay $22.6 million to U.S. market regulators to settle charges that it misled customers over the prices they were getting for some of their deals. The SEC said that two of the algorithms Citadel Securities used to execute orders on behalf of retail investors had not tried to obtain the best price in the marketplace.

In December 2018 Citadel Securities agreed to pay penalties of $3.5 million to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for submitting incomplete and inaccurate blue sheet data. The SEC uses such data to investigate potential insider trading and other fraud.^[7]

In May 2019, Citadel Securities invested $5 million into The Small Exchange, a start-up retail focused futures exchange.^[8]

In October 2020, Citadel Securities agreed to acquire the New York Stock Exchange market-making unit of IMC, significantly expanding its presence as a designated market maker in U.S. cash equities.^[9] The transaction helped make the firm the largest Designated Market Maker on the New York Stock Exchange and increased the number of corporate listings for which it is responsible.^[10]

In June of 2022, Ken Griffin said he planned to move the headquarters of both Citadel and Citadel Securities to Miami. He had already relocated some Citadel Securities staff to the Four Seasons Palm Beach in March 2020, during the Covid pandemic, and he had moved to Florida himself.^[11]

In April 2024, Citadel Securities was one of four top financial firms BlackRock added to its list of "authorised participants" in its spot Bitcoin exchange-traded fund.^[12]

Also in April 2024, Citadel Securities said it had moved the testing of the algorithms that power its trades into Google Cloud to cope with the huge amounts of data produced by financial markets.^[13]

In April 2025, Citadel Securities partnered with TransFICC, an e-trading technology provider for fixed income markets, to lead a $25 million Series B investment round. Other investors in the funding round included BlackFin Tech, AlbionVC, Citi, HSBC, Illuminate Financial, ING, and Commerzbank Group’s early-stage investor neosfer.^[14]

In July 2025, Citadel Securities and the American Securities Association won a suit challenging the SEC's funding plan for the Consolidated Audit Trail (CAT), which was set to cost Wall Street billions of dollars in fees. A federal appeals court in Atlanta invalidated the SEC's plan, calling it “arbitrary and capricious.” ^[15]

Products and Services[edit]

Citadel Securities acts as a specialist or market maker in more than 4,000 U.S. listed-options names, representing 99% of traded volume, and ranks as a top liquidity provider on the major U.S. options exchanges.^[16]

Citadel Securities is the largest DMM on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. It is also one of the world's largest ETF traders. The firm is active in U.S. Treasuries and other fixed income instruments, where it functions as a dealer for on-the-run and off-the-run government bond issues and related cash-settled derivatives.^[17]

Valuation Metrics, a Citadel Securities Corporate Solutions offering, provides clients with focused targeting of institutional investors.^[18]