Ken Griffin has built a two-headed profit monster at the center of the global financial system.
Citadel, Griffin's hedge fund, is minting money. With significant investments in oil and gas and commodities, Citadel booked $16 billion in profits in 2022. It is now the most profitable investment firm in history, topping Ray Dalio's Bridgewater.[1]
But hedge fund investments are only part of Citadel's rapidly expanding portfolio.
The other front of Griffin's empire, Citadel Securities, the high-frequency market maker, handles about $463bn in trades per day. For perspective, this amounts to roughly one in every four trades, or 25% of the entire market. CS will soon enter America’s $10tn corporate bond market.
As it gobbles up an ever-greater part of the global financial system, Griffin's two-headed monster appears to be growing in both reach and ambition. It is unclear what can stop them.
Citadel was founded fifteen years after Bridgewater (1975). ↩︎
