Citadel

“By the mid-two thousand, market makers like Citadel were spending hundreds of millions of dollars on microwave towers and fiber optic cables in a bid to shave microseconds off execution times.”

“Interview everyone and you get a 360 degree perspective of the industry, how the business makes money, its competitive edge, who the best employees are, etc.”

“Citadel probably interviewed several hundred Enron employees.”

“Citadel grew from a humble start in 1990 and he says, I became its first limited partner. So that adds to, you know, Ed Dorp's financial lore. It's the first LP in Citadel.”

“In this talk at Yale, he recommends a few books. And one of them is this book that I've heard that he makes people at Citadel or strongly recommends people at Citadel read. It's called, it's really hard to find. It's out of print. It's called hardball. Are you…”

“You should be risk seeking at this point in your life. So keep in mind, Ken started Citadel right out of college. This is a great moment to think about pursuing opportunities that have the maximal personal interest. You should go for it right here and right no…”

“Everything we did in the early nineties is completely commoditized. That's just a profound fact. A huge competitive edge in 1990 is just trivial today.”

“The glory is in the research is exactly what he says. He says the glory is in the research. Trading is the monetization of that research.”

“So the wonderful history of Citadel is how we are the most profitable hedge fund of all time.”

“In 2008, that tuition bill bill almost became getting expelled from school because we lost half our equity in 16 weeks in a firm. That had never had a double digit drawdown in 20 years.”

“Now, the great part of this story is I hired the entire leadership team of the quantitative research effort at Enron, all the people who actually knew how the place worked, and we've made thirty billion dollars in commodities since then.”

“Make sure you push your decision-making to those who are mentally in the game in the right way, because some people just, if it's their first adversity, they're like the proverbial deer in the headlights.”

“Citadel was founded 35 years ago. Citadel Securities was founded 23 years ago. His best and most profitable years have come in the last like three to four.”

“Citadel founded 35 years ago. Citadel Securities founded 23 years ago. And yet, you know, third, 23 and 35 years into his business, we have a 100,000 applicants for positions this year.”

“The more decisions of a similar nature, you can make the better at those decisions you become. So when we think about business activities far away from our core, I get much more anxious decisions within our core. I think we make pretty easily and pretty fluidl…”

“In business, you don't play to win. You play to win by a landslide. If you don't win by a landslide, then your competitors come back.”

“Where did the idea for the risk wall come from? It came because he went to Saudi Aramco's headquarters in Saudi Arabia.”

“He's an inventor of the first quantitative hedge fund. He was the first LP in the Citadel. He invented the first handheld computer with Claude Shannon.”

“I don't think anyone would tell you that Ken Griffin, the founder of Citadel, is like a prodigious trader, but he's built a business system and a business model that's the ultimate meritocracy, and, you know, you hire to effectively compensate for the deficien…”

“I think that Enron Online was a real way that they could have gotten real market power. I'm trying to think what that is. It's probably cornered resource. They would have had better access to information about the market than anyone else. It's almost like the …”