Citadel

  • 24 May 2013 at 3:25 PM

Citadel Would Like The Fees It Wrongly Paid Back

By

We’re going to guess that the options exchanges being sued by Citadel and three other firms plan to dispute the following statement. Read more »

  • 13 May 2013 at 2:41 PM

S&P Keeps Monopoly On Way To Count

By

The Dow Jones Industrial Average is a very stupid measure of the stock market for at least two reasons, which are (1) it is an average of only 30 big stocks and (2) it is weighted by share price, an entirely arbitrary number, rather than market cap or equal weighting or anything at all sensible. Was Mr. Dow an idiot? Probably not? He was just a guy inventing indices in 1896, when computers couldn’t fit in your pocket and were pulled by horses.1 Back then, to get a stock market average, some schmuck had to actually go look at a ticker tape for each stock price and then do the averaging on a … I’m gonna say an abacus? (Slide rule? HP 12C?) So “add up 30 stock prices and divide by 30″ seemed like a good plan; “take the float-adjusted market-cap-weighted average of 500 stock prices” did not. You can’t really fault Mr. Dow for the choices he made at the time he made them.

It is now 117 years later and nobody really uses the Dow anymore except, like, everybody, but people do use the S&P 500 index, which has the advantage that it’s a reasonable enough index of the thing it is an index of. But as with the Dow, a certain sense of “ooh the clerk is working so hard to calculate all these averages” still clings to the S&P, even though that’s obviously false. The clerk is a computer and it’s so bored calculating stock indices that it’s mining bitcoins on the side just to feel something.

I think that has something to do with this CBOE vs. International Securities Exchange dispute over S&P 500 (and DJIA!) index options. The CBOE lists such options; the ISE doesn’t but wants to. So the CME and McGraw-Hill, which together own the S&P 500 index, and the CBOE, which licenses it for options trading, sued in Illinois courts and got an injunction saying nobody else could use the index to list options. And today the CBOE finally totally won its case when the Supreme Court refused to hear it, leaving the Illinois court’s injunction in place, and thus leaving CBOE with a monopoly over derivatives on the S&P 500.2 Here’s CBOE’s gloating.

There’s no opinion from the Supreme Court and there’s a lot of goofball copyright preemption law involved; the Illinois court decided the case not on (federal) copyright law, but on … I dunno, this: Read more »

  • 15 Apr 2013 at 3:31 PM

David Tepper’s Lucky Brass Balls Worked Overtime In ’12

By

Overtime that was not for naught! Thanks to labor laws protecting LBBs, Tepper took home $2.2 billion last year. Other people who made some money in 2012: Read more »

Ken Griffin Is Good Enough, He’s Smart Enough, And, Doggone It, He’ll Keep Putting Up Double-Digit Returns This Year!

By

Citadel, the Chicago-based fund manager, trumpeted “an exceptional year” at its two main hedge funds, announcing annual returns of about 25 per cent in a letter to investors. Ken Griffin, Citadel’s founder and chief executive, said flagship funds Wellington and Kensington made a net return of 25.9 per cent and 24.9 per cent for 2012…The 2012 results follow a turbulent 2011 when Mr Griffin scaled back his ambition to build a more diversified financial institution to take on the likes of Goldman Sachs in investment banking. He set out three priorities for 2013: “to be highly profitable, to improve our productivity and to strengthen our teams.” [FT]

  • 05 Jun 2012 at 1:31 PM

Let’s Get One Thing Straight: Ken Griffin Only Accuses People Of Attempting to Gain A Competitive Advantage By Gaining Access To Proprietary Trading Strategies– He Does Not Get Accused!

By

Back in October, a former Citadel employee, Yihao “Ben” Pu, was arrested and charged with “stealing trade secrets” from Ken Griffin (by “copying company data onto a removable storage device,” and then attempting to sell it to Teza Technologies AKA the firm a bunch of ex-Citadel guys tried to join in 2009 before being sued for doing so by Griffin, as well as the the shop a former Goldman programmer, Sergey Aleynikov, went to jail for after giving it proprietary GS code). Now, because apparently people just can’t help themselves, KG has been forced to levy another allegation of theft against some former employees who he believes took a piece of his property when they left for high-frequency trading firm Jump Trading. Does Griffin have actual evidence that they swindled him? No, not exactly. But he’s got a hunch, and that hunch is based on the fact that since 2005, when people from Citadel’s “tactical trading group” started leaving for Jump, “some of the strategies” employed by the TTG “have become less profitable” and are “behaving in a way consistent with their having been copied by rivals.”

So what KG would like a court to do is force Jump to turn over “personnel documents, strategy and trading records, and source code,” which will prove him right and the Citadel defectors to be the pillagers he knows they are.  Evidence in hand, Griffin will then sue Jump and everyone named Ken Griffin will go home happy. The only issue that needs to be worked out is Jump Trading’s cooperation, which so far is proving difficult to obtain. In fact, the firm is being downright unhelpful and not only that? Its legal team has accused Ken of being the thief, or at least trying to be. That’s right: the way JT sees it, Citadel’s new algorithm development system is a two-step process that goes something like this:

Step 1: Steal successful algorithms from rival firm.

Step 2: Use them. Read more »

  • 12 Mar 2012 at 2:44 PM

Ken Griffin Would Love To Spend All His Time Figuring Out How To Keep His Funds Above Water But Someone Has To Make Sure America Stays Awesome

By

“I spend way too much of my time thinking about politics these days because government is way too involved in financial markets these days,” he said in a rare interview. He later added. “Part of my sensitivity to these issues is that I now live in the middle of a hyper-regulated industry, where not only is government affecting how capital markets work, or how banks work, but (the government) is punishing savers.” The 43-year-old hedge fund manager said he has invested more time than ever before on politics since the financial crisis of 2008 nearly crippled Citadel. The firm’s two flagship funds have since recovered, surpassing their so-called highwater marks this year…”I think (the ultra-wealthy) actually have an insufficient influence,” Griffin said in an interview at Citadel’s downtown office. “Those who have enjoyed the benefits of our system more than ever now owe a duty to protect the system that has created the greatest nation on this planet.” [Chicago Tribune, related]

  • 02 Feb 2012 at 5:01 PM

Dear Citadel Investors

By

January performance. Read more »

  • 20 Jan 2012 at 3:20 PM

Ken Griffin: We Did It, Guys!

By

From: Griffin, Kenneth
Sent: Friday, January 20, 2012 2:00 PM
To: All Employees
Subject: Thank You

Read more »

  • 10 Jan 2012 at 10:41 AM

Which Hedge Funds Were Most Profitable In 2011?

By

The latest issue of Bloomberg Markets magazine has the answer to that burning question but first, let’s take a gander at who had the best performance, among large hedge funds.

1. Tiger Global, YTD total return: 45% (assets, in billions: 6.0)
2. Renaissance Institutional Equities, 33.1% (7.0)
3. Pure Alpha II, 23.5% (53.0)
4. Discus Managed Futures Program, 20.9% (2.5)
5. Providence MBS, 20.6% (1.3)
6. Oculus, 19.0% (7.0)
7. All Weather 12%, 17.8% (4.4)
7. Dymon Asia Macro, 17.8% (1.6)
10. Citadel, 17.7% (11.0)
11. Coatue Management, 16.9% (4.7)
12. Stratus Multi-Strategy Program, 16.6% (3.7)
13. OxAM Quant Fund, 16.4% (2.0)
14. SPM Core, 15.7% (1.0)
15. Pure Alpha I, 14.9% (11.0)
16. Autonomy Global Macro, 13.9% (2.1)
17. BlackRock Fixed Income Global Alpha, 13.8% (2.4)
18. SPM Structured Serving Holding, 13.5% (1.6)
19. GSA Capital International, 13.0% (1.0)
20. JAT Capital, 12.7% (2.5)

And for those who judge themselves by how many bags of hundos they’ve got to strip naked and roll around in: Read more »

  • 03 Jan 2012 at 12:47 PM

This Is What Happens When You Forsake Ken Griffin!

By

“Re: WJB Capital cutting its brokerage operations…the firm had recently gone on a hiring spree, including a couple Citadel analysts.”

  • 09 Nov 2011 at 10:25 AM

Dear Citadel Investors

By

October performance. Read more »