The LSE Directory / Hedge funds
Citadel LLC is a global multi-strategy hedge fund founded in 1990 by Kenneth C. Griffin, initially under the name Wellington Financial Group before adopting the Citadel name in 1994. The firm invests across five internal strategy businesses, equities, fixed income and macro, commodities, credit and convertibles, and global quantitative strategies, deploying capital on behalf of institutional clients such as pensions, endowments and sovereign wealth funds. Citadel operates what the industry calls a pod shop model: capital is allocated across many independent portfolio manager teams, each running its own book within a centralized, real time risk management framework that can cut a team's allocation or force it to unwind quickly if losses breach set limits. This structure, shared with peers such as Millennium and Point72 but run at a scale few can match, distinguishes it from single strategy or long only managers and lets the firm rotate capital toward whichever pods and strategies are performing at a given moment. Griffin began trading from his Harvard dormitory room in 1986 and launched Citadel a year after graduating, growing it from roughly $4.6 million in starting capital to about $2 billion in assets within its first eight years. The firm's headquarters relocated from Chicago to Miami in 2022. As of January 2026 Citadel manages roughly $65 to 68 billion in assets and employs upwards of 3,100 people globally. Its flagship Wellington fund returned about 38% in 2022, producing an estimated $16 billion in net gains, the largest single year dollar profit recorded by a hedge fund at that time; by the end of that year Citadel had overtaken Bridgewater Associates as the most profitable hedge fund in history by cumulative gains since inception. Citadel LLC is legally distinct from Citadel Securities, the market making firm Griffin also founded. More recently Citadel has expanded into physical energy and commodities infrastructure, acquiring stakes including Japanese power company Energy Grid in 2024 and gas and power assets such as Paloma Natural Gas and Germany's FlexPower in 2025, extending its commodities business beyond pure financial trading.
