GRIFFIN ‘BRIDGE’ PASS

Citadel banks $16B

Citadel, the hedge fund run by billionaire Ken Griffin, reported a record $16 billion in profit last year — knocking off Ray Dalio’s Bridgewater as the most successful firm seven years running.

The Miami-based investing giant, which manages $54 billion in assets, reported a 38.1% return on its main hedge fund, according to the Financial Times, citing research by LCH Investments, a subsidiary of EUbased investment house Edmond de Rothschild.

LCH reported Citadel’s total gross trading profit last year amounted to

$28 billion. Investors were charged around $12 billion in expenses and performance fees, according to FT.

Since its founding in 1990, Citadel has reported net gains of $66 billion — besting Dalio’s Bridgewater, which generated net gains of more than $58 billion.

The $16 billion profit that Citadel netted for its investors surpasses the $15.6 billion bet made by John Paulson against subprime mortgages back in 2007.

Citadel’s windfall wasn’t powered by any single outsized bet, but rather by successful trades across the equities and fixed income markets, according to Bloomberg. Citadel also generated revenue by moving beyond options trading and expanding into equities, foreign exchange, credit indexes, commodities, exchange-traded funds and interest-rate swaps.

Citadel told investors its flagship Wellington fund returned roughly 32% through the end of November, a sharp contrast to much of Wall Street and the economy at large. By then, the average hedge fund lost 4%, and the benchmark S&P 500 stock index plunged 16% as the Federal Reserve wrestles with high inflation and a potential recession.

Citadel Securities, which has been dubbed “the Amazon of financial markets,” is responsible for 1 out of every 5 stock trades made in the US.

It has become one of Wall Street’s biggest “market makers” — or companies that quote the buy and sell price of securities and then profit from the difference in the bid-ask spread.

Citadel Securities, the market-making arm of Griffin’s empire, reported a record $7.5 billion of revenue last year, according to Bloomberg News. The unit is partly credited for the rise of retail brokerages such as Robinhood.

Griffin (inset), whose net worth has been valued by Bloomberg at $29.4 billion, built his fortune on quantitative analysis, or quant trading, which relies on computer algorithms and statistical analysis to gauge where the market is going.