Citadel Securities raided Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan & Morgan Stanley for its new business

Citadel Securities has another new business. And it's hired top banks' top people to work in it.

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Jim Esposito, the dryly humorous hard-grinding, ex-wrestler whom Citadel Securities hired from Goldman Sachs to be its president in 2024, said yesterday that the electronic trading firm is launching a high touch equities business in the first quarter of next year. 

Much as Citadel Securities has been hoovering up top rates trading talent as it expands in that area, its hires so far for the high touch equities business read like a catalogue of the industry's finest. 

Bloomberg notes that they include Joseph Anastasio, Samuel French, and Ben Dannhauser, who are reporting into Citadel Securities' new head of high touch trading, Elan Luger.

Luger himself comes from JPMorgan, where he was head of the high touch equities business in New York until September 2025. Anastasio spent 16 years as an equities sales trader at Goldman Sachs, where he presumably worked with Esposito and was a managing director before leaving for the briefest interlude at Citi from September 2024. French was the head of NY Institutional sales trading at Bank of America. Dannhauser was head of Americas cash trading at Morgan Stanley. 

Dannhauser, French and Anastasio are still registered as working for Morgan Stanley, Bank of America and Citi with FINRA. Citadel Securities evidently hired them late in the year, and presumably bought out their bonuses in the process. Equities bonuses are expected to be particularly large this year. 

If you too want to work in high touch equities trading for Citadel Securities, the implication is that it's still hiring. Esposito said Luger is "assembling" a team.

Citadel Securities is a market making firm that cut its teeth on relatively high speed trades. However, the Financial Times noted in September that it's begun "warehousing" risk over longer time durations, "sometimes as long as weeks."  

Citadel Securities' new high touch business will work on large equity block trades for institutional clients. These require a lot more handholding than the average electronic trade. Esposito notes that Citadel Securities already accounts for 25% of daily US equities trading volume and so is in a strong position to expand into this more human-intensive zone.

Senior equities figures at banks are already viewing Citadel Securities' new business with trepidation. "They are going to be so dominant, with access to so much trading information and who does what and what price," says one. "This is competing head-to-head with banks' equities franchises," he adds. "They’ve likely realized that to capture larger institutional wallet share, they need to service clients who trade large, sensitive blocks that can’t be done via algos alone. These clients require market colour, discretion, and human judgment. - They value relationship based coverage rather than anonymous electronic fills."

Another suggests that Citadel Securities might start a prime broking business next. "People would want to know what the boundaries are between Citadel and Citadel Securities, though," he adds. 

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