Dear Clients,
One question has come up regularly in my client conversations this year: why would the global leader in equities market making, built to operate at extraordinary scale across retail, on-exchange, and institutional electronic channels, make such a significant investment to build a High Touch Equities business rooted in human relationships?
We launched our High Touch Equities business this year, and the early results are beginning to answer that question.
We have executed hundreds of block trades over the past few months. At the same time, we have expanded our relationships with clients, including some of the world’s leading venture capital and private equity firms.
The progress we’ve made has validated the conviction behind our investment: exceptional client coverage is even more powerful when paired with the connectivity, scale, and breadth of Citadel Securities.
Every day, we operate at enormous scale across global markets. That gives us deep insight into liquidity, flows, and market dynamics—and our systems and people process that information at speed, helping us spot changes as they happen. For clients, that means going beyond simply knowing where the market is at any given moment to understanding where liquidity is moving and how that should shape timing, risk, and execution.
The opportunity we envision goes well beyond the traditional high-touch model. We are building a broader franchise across asset classes and geographies—from structured products in Asia to European rates—expanding our connectivity across the market and raising the bar for what clients should expect from their partners.
Our ambition is to build a category of one.
Thank you for your trust, partnership, and feedback. You have helped shape what we are building—and where we go next.
We’re just getting started.
Sincerely,
Jim Esposito, President
Citadel Securities
Expanding Our Toolkit
In today’s markets, the edge belongs to those who can turn insight into action. At Citadel Securities, we’re building tools that bring together our leading liquidity, market intelligence and seamless execution to help clients move with speed and confidence.
From the Library
| 📰 | The Economist | An interview with Elon Musk |
| 📈 | New York University | AI-Driven Alpha Decay: Algorithmic Homogenization, Reflexive Signal Erosion, and the Paradox of Intelligent Markets |
| 📰 | Harvard Business Review | Don’t Let AI Make Bad Analytics Worse |
| 🖥️ | Benedict Evans | Ways to think about token pricing |
| 📈 | Columbia Business School | Financing the AI Buildout |
Summer Reads, Watches, and Listens
Chart Topping
Retail traders at Citadel Securities returned as net buyers across our platform in August, reversing the accelerating selling we observed at the end of July.
The turn is notable given how extreme that selling had become. At the end of July, Information Technology experienced the largest week of retail selling on our platform, surpassing the previous record from 2020 by more than 20% in net notional terms. Even more unusually, retail sold into weakness rather than buying the dip, with much of the liquidation concentrated in the same semiconductor and memory names that attracted record inflows during May and June.
One week later, that behavior began to reverse. Retail remained a net seller of Information Technology in aggregate, driven primarily by continued selling into strength across the Magnificent 7 and Software, but returned to buying many of their highest-conviction names from May and June – particularly across semiconductors and memory.
That buying has accelerated further last week. Net buying across Monday and Tuesday ranks in the 90th percentile of all two-day periods over the past year.
Retail Cash – Software Industry Net Notional
Average Daily Net Notional by Week (Indexed to Average Since 2019), 1-Year Lookback
Source: Citadel Securities, Global Market Intelligence, as of August 11, 2026. Figures are for illustrative purposes only. Past performance figures do not guarantee future results.
A Look Across the Firm
Some Macro Thoughts | From Forward Guidance to Market Guidance
Nohshad Shah, Head of Fixed Income Sales – EMEA
The Fed sounds hawkish, but markets ae testing the reaction function. Chair Warsh was unequivocal that there is “no soft inflation target”, that five-plus years of above-target inflation cannot be cured by nine weeks of better data, and that this Fed “will not waver”. Yet despite that language…and three members preferring an immediate hike…the FOMC again declined to move.
Read Nohshad’s take here.
Global Market Intelligence | August Checklist
Scott Rubner, Head of Equity and Equity Derivative Strategy
The S&P 500 has made 26 all-time highs this year despite a wall of macro worry. Why?
Because underneath the noise, the balance of flows is beginning to shift.
The macro crosscurrents are real, dispersion remains extreme, and positioning has moved quickly. There are plenty of reasons to be cautious, which is why most of my inbound continues to focus on the same question: What can go wrong?
Read Scott’s take here.
Global Macro Strategy | Fed Views: The Case for July
Frank Flight, Macro Strategist
We have for some time argued that inflation risks were tilted to the upside, that the labor market was no longer a source of downside risk to the economy, and that the Fed staff and speakers were moving in a more hawkish direction. Ahead of the June meeting, we published an expectation of rate hikes in September and December. The tone of the June meeting was consistent with our significantly more hawkish-than-consensus outlook, with Chair Warsh repeatedly emphasizing price stability and implying that the Fed is willing to act against the one-sided risks to its mandate.
Read Frank’s take here.
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