Citadel Securities is a global market-making firm that provides liquidity and trade execution across equities, options, fixed income, currencies and Treasury bonds in more than 35 countries. It is majority-owned by Kenneth Griffin and is structurally distinct from Citadel LLC, the multi-strategy hedge fund Griffin also controls. The firm continuously prices large numbers of securities and stands ready to buy and sell them, taking the other side of client trades and earning the bid-ask spread, rather than managing outside investor capital as an asset manager would. It is the largest designated market maker on the New York Stock Exchange and describes itself as the largest single liquidity provider in US options. Its core relationships are with retail brokerages: it pays firms such as Robinhood and Charles Schwab for the right to execute their customers' stock and option orders, a payment for order flow model under which US market makers collectively paid more than 4.9 billion dollars a year for retail order flow as of 2025, led by Citadel Securities and IMC. On the institutional side it has pushed into territory long dominated by bank trading desks, expanding into European rates trading in 2024 and into investment grade credit, where it reached an 18 percent share of grey market trading by mid 2025. Its leadership attributes the firm's edge to running its market-making businesses on proprietary, in-house technology rather than third-party systems, and to allocating capital fluidly across desks and netting risk across products instead of running each business line as a separate silo, a structure the firm contrasts with the more compartmentalized trading floors of large banks. Citadel Securities was founded in 2002 by Kenneth Griffin. Peng Zhao has been chief executive since 2017 and Griffin serves as chairman; Jim Esposito, a 29 year veteran of Goldman Sachs, joined as president in September 2024. The firm acquired IMC's NYSE market-making unit in October 2020 and, in January 2022, took its first outside capital, a 1.15 billion dollar investment from Sequoia Capital and Paradigm that valued the business at roughly 22 to 24 billion dollars. It employed approximately 1,800 people as of 2025 and reported 2024 revenue of 9.7 billion dollars and net income of 4.2 billion dollars. It has been named Risk.net's Flow Market Maker of the Year every year from 2017 to 2026. The firm has also drawn multiple SEC and FINRA fines since 2014 over matters including trade reporting errors, misleading pricing claims and short selling violations. In April 2025, during tariff driven market volatility, the firm executed a record 1.4 trillion dollars in gross monthly trading volume, about 75 percent above its prior peak during the March 2023 banking crisis, with its Treasury desk posting a 45 percent hit ratio on quoted prices through the spike. In November 2025 it disclosed investments in the crypto firms Ripple and Kraken, extending its activity beyond traditional securities markets.
