저자: 미상 · 한국인
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2026년 7월 뉴욕, 고레버리지 헤지펀드(Leopold Abrenner 운용)가 마진콜로 SK하이닉스 관련 등 약 20조원 주식을 매물로 내놓자, 시타델(Citadel)이 이를 인수. 영상은 시타델의 창립부터 시타델 증권(마켓메이커), 2008년 위기, 게임스탑 사태, 2026년 인수 배경까지 회사 역사를 서술. 특정 자산의 가격 방향에 대한 예측 발언은 없음.
다듬은 글
Thursday night, July 32, 2026, New York. Leopold Abrenner, a 24-year-old called a genius for earning 439% in half a year . Driven by debt, he sold 20 trillion won worth of stocks overnight. It's that margin call case we covered last time. Items put out in a hurry usually don't fetch their proper price , but on that day, the price of those 20 units actually went up.
Who on earth took that 20 trillion that everyone threw away out of fear? The only place that took it was Ken Griffin's Citadel. And it was also the place where the decision was made that allowed the KOSPI to catch its breath the next day . However. It's strange. It is a company that swallowed 20 trillion won overnight and remained unfazed, yet few people in Korea even know its name .
What on earth is this place, and why did they choose the moment when everyone had already run away? Today, I will follow from the hopsal on the dormitory roof to the 20th group that night. If you listen to the end, you will hear what is going on behind the name Citadel that flashes by in the news . The story begins in 1987 at a Harvard University dormitory.
One day, 19-year-old college student Ken Griffin climbed onto the dormitory roof. He was holding a dish antenna in his hand. I want to receive real-time stock prices from my room. Nowadays, market prices pop up just by opening a smartphone, but in 1987, it was a time when people checked them via newspaper or phone.
A college student climbing onto the dormitory roof to be the first to see the rebellion—it’s an unusual start. What he dug into was a somewhat unfamiliar object. It is a bond received by lending money to a company that includes a voucher allowing it to be exchanged for the company's stock if desired; this is called a private loan .
Griffin waited for the moment when the value of this item deviated slightly from the theoretical value . It was a strategy of selling the BitPhoto side and using related stocks to hedge against the risk, safely pocketing only the difference. The catalyst was an article in the business magazine Forbes.
The article was about how the stock of a home shopping company was inflated compared to its actual value, and he saw an opportunity to make money in that article that others just passed over . $265,000 borrowed from acquaintances such as my grandmother and a dentist . About 360 million won was insignificant.
A college student who wasn't even 20 years old started making real money in a single room, and the rumors spread quickly. I heard there is a student in the dormitory who makes money by trading bonds . Now , however, we do n't know yet whether this was luck or skill. It comes in the autumn of the year it is tested.
Starting on the morning of Monday, October 19, 1987, sell orders poured in, and the U.S. stock market collapsed by more than 22% in just one day . It is the day that will later be called Black Monday. Investors who had been laughing until yesterday were screaming while clutching their phones, and there were even people whose lifetime savings vanished in half a day.
Amidst that chaos, was the 19-year-old in the dormitory room doing nothing? He opens his account. The number had actually increased. The device that had been pre-installed on the opposite side to bring in money when the price dropped activated that day . When everyone throws, there is a side that lives .
This is a sentence the 19-year-old learned with his body that day . This rumor spreads all the way to Chicago. It even reached the ears of Frank Meyer, a seasoned investor leading an investment firm called Glenwood . Meyer, who was looking for a young operator, meets this college student in person. And entrust about 1 million (1.4 billion KRW) to Griffin, who has just graduated .
I am 2 years old and not even a proven veteran. What did Meyer see that made him open his wallet? What Meyer bought wasn't the report card, but this student's persistence. That choice was not wrong. The first results far exceeded expectations, and this money becomes the seed capital to establish a company.
It was the moment the money the student had been rolling around in his room came out onto the real table . Three years later, in 1990, 22-year-old Griffin launched his own company in Chicago. However, the name written on that sign was not the name we know now. In November 1990, the sign of the company founded by 22-year-old Griffin in Chicago read Wellington Financial Group.
It wasn't the Citadel. Starting capital is about 460 dollars. Around 6 billion won. Even now, it is a large sum of money, but by Wall Street standards, which look down on hundreds of billions, it is just a small corner store, and in 1994, the first ordeal came. It was the year I lost money for the first time on the company's founding day as interest rates suddenly jumped.
A loss of approximately 4% based on Griffin's own reflection. Even though the numbers might look impressive, for someone in their mid-20s who had never seen that before, it was the first year they hit a wall . In the same year, when I went to Switzerland to raise investment funds, something like this happened .
The other party mistook Griffin for a famous investor with the same name . It is said that when he realized he was a different person, he canceled the lunch appointment he had made right then and there. In that year of the old calendar, Grihim changes the company name . Citadel means a fortress that does not fall to any attack .
It's like putting up a sign that we will never be broken again. Then, with what was that promise kept? Citadel did not bet on intuition or betting. Betting on probabilities calculated by a computer by finding repeating patterns in vast amounts of data, instead of human intuition, is called Quan. Furthermore, they didn't just stick to one thing .
We set up teams wherever there was money to be made, whether in stocks, bonds, or raw materials. They devised a system where if one well dried up, water would be drawn from another . Did this method work? The numbers speak for themselves. Money that started at $4.6 million grows to billions of dollars in 10 years, and then to tens of billions of dollars .
As of 2026, the amount of money Citadel manages is $670. It approaches 90 trillion won. A company that started in a single room ended up moving more money than the annual budget of an average country . In 2022, the amount of money generated for customers alone was approximately 16 billion won . 20 trillion won.
So, it essentially means that later on, it earned enough money in a year to cover the volume received that night . It was the largest annual record in hedge fund history. In the same year, Griffin 's individual income exceeded 5 trillion won in about 40 days. He was the highest-earning fund manager in the world .
Where would someone who earned 5 trillion won a year spend that money ? In 2019, he bought a penthouse in Manneton, New York for over 240 million won, which is over 300 million won in Korean currency . It was the most expensive house sold in the U.S. at the time . In 2021, a first printed edition of the U.S.
Constitution was acquired at auction for approximately $43 million, which is over 50 billion won . It was an auction where I raised money online and defeated 17 people by myself. In 2024, we even bought a Stegosaurus dinosaur fossil for about $45 million, which is close to 60 billion won . I was someone who had bought almost everything that money could buy.
Then, how about working at a company like this ? What made Citadel scary was n't the money it showed off. This company is considered the hardest place to get into and the hardest to survive on Wall Street. Underperforming teams are ruthlessly let go, while high-performing individuals receive the best treatment in the industry.
We even found ways to poach key talent from competitors entirely for a huge sum of money . On the very day Elon filed for bankruptcy in 2001, a Citadel charter plane landed at Houston Airport . They flew in to interview the entire group of traders from the collapsed company . It was essentially like using me for a recruitment briefing when others called me a funeral, but the people brought in that way later became the backbone of the Citadel Energy business.
That is why it earned the nickname "the most feared company on Wall Street ." But you see. Just once, under the name Citadel, this fortress came close to collapsing. And that is because of the very method the founder was most confident in. The global financial crisis erupts in the fall of 2008. Lehman Brothers collapsed in September, and perfectly fine banks disappeared overnight.
Then, was that fortress really safe? It was n't. The value of the assets that the Citadel had heavily staked plummeted as there were too many sellers and no buyers. The dangers that were usually scattered here and there have now exploded all at once in every place . Even the system where you could draw from another well if one dried up was useless when all the wells dried up at the same time.
That year, Shtadere's flagship fund lost more than half of its assets. At that time, it was not the fortress said to be the strongest on Wall Street, but merely a fund cut in half . Anxious customers flocked to withdraw their money. Rumors circulated on Wall Street that the Citadel was about to collapse.
In the bond market, there were even people betting that Citadel would not be able to repay its debt. The employees reportedly worried every night about whether the company would be able to open its doors the next morning. Come to think of it, it is a ridiculous scene. Because that company, which was said to be the one that buys when everyone else throws, was on the side where everyone else throws this time .
The difference between the buyer and the thrower was just a sheet of paper . So, then, what would Griffin have done? To pay out the money, we had to throw away assets at rock-bottom prices, and the moment we did, the company was on the verge of becoming nothing but a shell, not just cut in half. Griffin chose to lock the door.
They blocked the redemption and said they could not pay out the money right now, so they asked us to wait. It was a decision made knowing that customers would turn their backs on it. There was also a small amount to endure. In 1998, Citadel was ahead of the industry in introducing long-term commitments that prevented clients from withdrawing for several years, but a few weeks after the introduction, a massive fund called LTCM collapsed.
That year, the Citadel actually earned 30% . Thanks to that agreement, the redemption requests that could actually be withdrawn in 2008 amounted to $1.5 billion. Our money, Lee Jong-won, only reached a level that was not enough. I paid the lowest tuition fee for someone else's mistake. Even after that, I filled the remaining gaps with my own money .
Griffin and the management poured $500 million of their own money, which is 600 million won in our currency, into the company. Without selling the company or asking the government for help . Eventually, as the market recovered, the money was recovered over several years. By around 12 years, it fully recovers to pre-crisis levels.
We have restored the money that had been cut in half back to its original state. It is rare for a fund on Wall Street to walk out of such a deep pit. Of course, there is no need to romanticize this era. After all, it is a clear record that we lost half of the customer's money and prevented them from withdrawing it.
However, the lesson this experience instilled in the company was clear. A crisis is bound to come. Therefore, you must first build the physical strength to survive even if a crisis comes . However, the Stadel I have been talking about so far is only half of it. Griffin has one more company besides Hatch Fund .
And this second company is actually much closer to our daily lives . Because it is a place that tens of millions of Americans unknowingly pass through every time they buy stocks on their smartphones. In 2002, Griffin established a separate company called Citadel Securities. The names were similar, but the work they did was completely different.
If the hedge fund Citadel directly manages money to generate profits, Citadel Securities is an intermediary in the middle of the market. I’ll explain what happened in a small marketplace . Cheolsu wants to buy a certain stock, and Yeongin wants to sell the same stock . It is difficult for two people to find each other in person and negotiate.
At this time, if there is a merchant in the middle who sells to Cheolsu and buys from Yeong-i, the market runs smoothly. A person who creates a market . So, such merchants are called market makers. The very small difference between the buying price and the selling price is this merchant's share. It is at the level of a few won per case.
You're asking if it's pocket change? If you process hundreds of millions of those transactions a day, it's a different story. In fact, Citadel Securities is known to handle about 40% of stock trading by U.S. retail investors . When Americans buy stocks on their smartphones, four out of ten orders pass through this company without them even realizing it.
Just as no one is aware of the payment network running behind the scenes when swiping a card at a supermarket, people barely felt the presence of this merchant . However, there is one strange thing here. These days, individuals buy and sell stocks without paying commissions, so how do those orders end up at Citadel Securities ?
There was a calculation behind the freebie. Stock apps like Robinhood pass customers' orders to market makers like Citadel Securities and receive money in return . Buying and selling the flow of orders itself . This is called order flow sales. It is a structure where the app uses that money to provide commissions for free, and the market maker takes a small profit from the orders received .
There was an invisible merchant behind the deal that looked like it was free . So, then, what did this merchant use to beat others? The weapon was speed. Citadel Securities trades in units of one second divided into one million. It is like buying and selling thousands of times in the blink of an eye .
Enormous amounts of money have been poured into computers and communication networks to maintain this speed . It is to receive market prices and place orders quickly, even if it is just one-millionth of a second faster than others. Then, is this structure really only beneficial to individuals ? There are certainly those who do not look kindly upon it.
The question is whether the app selling off customer orders is really the best value for the customer. Some European countries have even banned the sale of this order flow entirely . Conversely, the side being tested counters that individuals actually receive better prices due to fierce competition .
There is still debate about who is right . However, one thing is clear: the quiet merchant has already entered the very heart of the market . Then, in January 2022, the rage of millions of retail investors was directed at one company of all places . Why of all things? In January 2021, the stock price of a company called GameStop began to rise.
It was an offline game store that was said to be going out of business. This stock jumped more than tenfold in less than a month. Do you know who was scooping up this stock? It was not a Hazzi fund. They were ordinary individual investors, the people we commonly call ants. It all started on an internet bulletin board.
Individual investors gathered on the bulletin board and shouted after seeing that large hatch funds had bet on GameStop's stock price falling. Let's all buy together and teach those funds a lesson. The bulletin board was filled with a strange festival-like atmosphere, a mix of revenge and play . As millions of people flocked in, stock prices soared wildly, and the losses of hedge funds that had bet on the decline snowballed.
It was an unprecedented scene in Wall Street history, where an ant drove Goliath to the brink . One day, when stock prices were soaring, something strange happened . Robinhood, the stock app that was the stronghold of retail investors, suddenly blocked the GameStop buy button. You can sell, but you cannot buy.
The soaring stock price plummeted right on the spot, and the retail investors were furious. And the place that arrow was aimed at was the Citadel. The ants had their own reasons for why it had to be a company . Two lines were visible to the ants. First, it was the stock that would be cast by the big hand that accepts Robin Hood's orders.
Second, there was a fund that bet on a GameStop drop and collapsed. This is Melvin Capital. Hatch fund Citadel just poured about $2 billion, or 2.8 trillion won, into this . Ca n't you picture it? "Didn't Citadel have Robin Nude block retail investors from buying to protect itself from losses?" This suspicion spread across the entire United States in an instant .
Eventually, Griffin is summoned to a general hearing of the U.S. Congress . Lawmakers pressed them during a live broadcast watched by millions. Did you put pressure on Robin Hood ? Griffin denied it clearly. The Citadel played no role in Robin Hood's decision . Even the official investigation did not yield direct evidence that the two companies colluded .
Robinhood blocked the purchase due to its own internal circumstances, as it suddenly had to accumulate more funds to guarantee the transaction . However, the doubts in the public mind were not completely erased . There is one thing this incident left behind . The structure of order flow selling, which had been hidden behind free commissions, was brought to the public eye for the first time .
The whole of America has come to realize that a massive shadow called the Citadel stands behind the buy button that people are pressing without reporting . And five years later, calls from banks are directed to this company again. This time, x was different. It is the night of July 32, 2026, in New York again.
Let's continue Leopold's story . The starting point was unexpectedly Korea. Among the assets his fund had heavily invested in, there were also certificates related to SK Hynix. Then, starting in July, as AI-related stocks slid one after another, losses spiraled out of control . Then, a margin call was made, and 20 trillion won worth of stock was put up for sale.
The problem was that if such a large volume were simply dumped onto the market, prices would collapse first . So, banks make phone calls all night long to find a place that will quietly take this entire volume . Rejection, and another rejection. I came back overnight saying that it was too big a lump to digest .
As the clock turned toward dawn, all that remained in the banks' hands was 20 trillion won worth of paper with nothing to eat. The last number on that phone was a company with offices in Chicago and New York . The only place that stepped forward to accept it was the Citadel. However, there were three reasons why the other places couldn't raise their hands .
The first thing was physical strength. For a company managing 90 trillion, 20 trillion was not an insurmountable mountain, but a scale they had handled before. If it were an average company, they would have stumbled the moment they took the job. We've already heard where that stamina comes from . It was the winter of 2008, when we didn't close down even after losing half of our customers' money.
Then, could anyone receive it as long as they had the stamina ? The technology overlaps here. For a market maker who processes hundreds of millions of transactions every day, the main job was to discreetly release large chunks into the market little by little . The task of absorbing the received volume without causing the price to collapse.
Because that was the technology this company had honed for 30 years . And there is a separate side that lives when it was the last layer . This company hasn't let go of that one week the 19-year-old won on Black Monday for 30 years . So, what happened to the market that day? When that 20 trillion went to the Citadel, the market felt relieved rather than collapse.
Because the listings that could flood the market at any moment have disappeared. On that day, the US Nasdaq 100 index rose by more than 3%. It happened to be the day Microsoft jumped over 16% with surprise earnings, but analysis suggests that the relief of the 8th coming to an end also played a role.
And that warmth touched even the KOSPI, which had plummeted across the Pacific overnight. The decision of this company was also part of the background that allowed our market to catch its breath that day . To a 24-year- old, it was a night his life fell apart; to the Citadel, it was just another deal.
It may sound cruel, but that is how the market works. Because there must be someone willing to pay for the goods someone hastily threw away for the market not to stop. In that case, was this a coincidence? Or was it a habit honed over more than 30 years? If you were to summarize Ken Griffin's life in one sentence, it would be like this.
A 19-year-old who used to watch market prices from the dormitory roof, returned alive from a half-crash, sat quietly behind the stock trading of tens of millions of Americans, and took home the entire 20 trillion on the night everyone ran away . Some call Sita a shadow that quietly dominates the market, while others call him a cold-blooded strategist who turns crisis into opportunity.
Which way do you see it? However, one thing is clear. That position was not for the lucky, but for those who had fallen . The next time our market is shaken up again, you will hear a little differently about who is quietly buying behind the news. By the way, I do not mean that you should buy or sell any of the companies or stocks mentioned today .
We have merely looked into the structure of past events together, and the judgment and its consequences are always up to the viewer. no see.
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