Citadel muscles into world of credit derivatives

Huge market: A file picture showing traders working at the Citadel Securities post on the floor of the NYSE. The firm has traded more than US116bil of credit-default swaps tied to US benchmark indexes since April. – Reuters

LONDON: Ken Griffin has become impossible to ignore in the once-lucrative world of credit derivatives, where a group of Wall Street dealers long maintained a stranglehold.

After being kept on the sidelines for the past eight years, Griffin’s Citadel Securities is muscling into the market. The firm has traded more than US$116bil of credit-default swaps tied to US benchmark indexes since April, according to spokesman Zia Ahmed. That’s about 11.5% of total trading of those contracts when compared to reported data aggregated from the Depository Trust and Clearing Corp. and Bloomberg’s swap data repository.