Citadel

In nineteen ninety, the stock exchange operated on human time. Traders shouted prices on the floor. Information traveled at sound speed. A market maker in New York had identical information as one in Chicago. Profit came from reading human behavior and exploiting human timing. Speed was mechanical, not electronic. Nobody had advantage or edge. Ken Griffin built Citadel on latency advantage. His traders executed trades in microseconds. When a stock ticked up one cent, they had already bought shares before traders in other cities saw the quote update. Information traveled through fiber optics at light speed. Citadel was faster than the market itself. Physics gave them tremendous power and dominance. Speed compressed margins to fractions of a penny.