Market Insights Evolving Our Equities Franchise

Evolving Our Equities Franchise

November 06, 2025

 

Dear Clients,

We’re excited to announce the launch of Citadel Securities’ High Touch Equities business – built the Citadel Securities way: through technology, partnership, and innovation. We’ve recently welcomed Elan Luger to lead this initiative and are assembling a world-class team around him. Elan and I will soon be meeting with many of you to share how we’re designing this business to deliver the execution quality, transparency, and insight you expect from Citadel Securities.

With our leading position in U.S. equities – trading nearly 25% of the daily volume – along with our operational scale and unique approach to risk management, we’re well-positioned to offer exceptional pricing and execution.

But we’re not building a business that competes solely on price – we’re building one designed to meet your evolving execution needs and help shape the markets of tomorrow.

We are also developing a suite of data and analytics tools that leverage our unique insights into global equity flows to help you make superior trading decisions.

  • Singlestock dashboard to unpack non-fundamental drivers of price action – including retail positioning, institutional ownership, factor analytics, derivative flows, and near-term catalysts – to complement fundamental research
  • Pre-trade analytics to quantify expected impact costs across venues, enabling optimal execution style selection and one-click trade capability
  • Valuation Metrics1, our quant-driven corporate access platform, combining more than one hundred fundamental inputs, valuation models, and trend signals that provide insight when connecting corporates and investors with precision

And we’re just getting started. We’ll continue to iterate, innovate, and expand.

We’re currently beta testing our High Touch Equities platform ahead of a Q1 formal launch and welcome your feedback as we refine our offering. If you’d like to learn more, please reach out to me or Elan directly. Our goal remains the same: to understand the challenges you face and help solve them through both market expertise and better analytics. I’m confident Citadel Securities is uniquely positioned to help you navigate – and shape – the capital markets of the future.

We look forward to continuing our partnership.

Jim Esposito, President
Citadel Securities


From the Library

✏️ Harvard University Generative AI as Seniority-Biased Technological Change: Evidence from U.S. Résumé and Job Posting Data
🖥️ Google DeepMind New AI agent evolves algorithms for math and practical applications in computing by combining the creativity of large language models with automated evaluators
✏️ Zhejiang University, Cornell University Generative AI and Firm Productivity: Field Experiments in Online Retail
📑 METR Measuring the Impact of Early-2025 AI on Experienced Open-Source Developer Productivity
✏️ Stanford GSB The Real Cost of Benchmarking
🖥️ OpenAI GDPVal: Evaluating AI Model Performance on Real-World Economically Valuable Tasks
✏️ Cornell University, Harvard Business School, ETH Zurich Interviews allow employers to learn about workers, but do they also enable workers to learn about firms?
📑 Bank for International Settlements The transformation of the life insurance industry: systemic risks and policy challenges

Fall Reads, Watches, and Listens

 

In Case You Missed It
We’ve created a YouTube playlist in case you weren’t able to join us at our Future of Global Markets conference. Check out all the sessions here.


Chart Topping

Retail Equities – Net Notional by Week
Std Dev January-October 2025

Citadel Securities’ Retail Clients had the largest net notional buying since 2022. It was a >3 std dev buy demand, despite equity markets at all-time highs.

Source: Citadel Securities, as of October 31, 2025. Figures are for illustrative purposes only. Past performance figures do not guarantee future results.


Some Macro Thoughts…The Fed Recalibrates 
Nohshad Shah, Head of Fixed Income Sales – EMEA
Fed Chair Powell struck a hawkish tone this week at the FOMC presser despite delivering an expected 25bp cut to policy rates. Specifically, he chose to highlight that a December cut was “not a foregone conclusion” and noted “strongly differing views” on the committee, suggesting both significant pushback to more rate cuts and likely further dissents to come (we had two this time – on either side of the divide). With the phrase “when you are driving in the fog, you slow down” he flagged that we might soon be coming to the end of this phase of insurance cuts.

Read Nohshad’s take here.


Global Market Intelligence | November
Scott Rubner, Head of Equity and Equity Derivative Strategy
Over the past several weeks, I’ve been on the road meeting clients across the globe. The consistent message: institutional investors remain cautious and are hesitant to add risk. However, today’s CPI print gives equities the green light in the absence of near-term economic headwinds.
As we head into November, several important flow-of-funds and technical dynamics come into play – many of which begin this week. The following highlights are drawn from my latest GMI presentation, which I’m sharing more broadly. I remain constructive on U.S. equities and expect these themes to dominate client discussions as new all-time highs are made.

Read Scott’s take here.

1. This material is simply a compilation of otherwise publicly available data, and neither Citadel Securities Corporate Solutions nor Citadel Securities LLC has undertaken any analysis of such information beyond such compilation. This information does not constitute either “Research” or “Investment Advice”, as those terms are defined under the applicable securities laws, and should not be construed as such. Neither Citadel Securities Corporate Solutions is not an investment advisor and makes no recommendation as to the advisability of transacting in any securities or other financial products.

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