Citadel Brand Guidelines: Wellington Financial, Two Citadels and a 2022 Move to Miami

A Chicago fund that changed its name.

Citadel was founded in 1990 by Kenneth Griffin, English Wikipedia says. It was first called Wellington Financial Group, after its flagship fund, and took the name Citadel in 1994; it was later known as Citadel Investment Group before becoming Citadel LLC. Its first home was Chicago, where it stayed for more than three decades.

The firm grew into a multi-strategy hedge fund — one that runs many investment teams in different markets under one roof. English Wikipedia lists its funds as the flagship Wellington fund, from 1990; Fixed Income and Macro, from 1999; Citadel Global Equities, from 2001; and Tactical Trading, from 2007. It describes a structure of semi-autonomous teams that manage their own portfolios across equities, commodities, fixed income, quantitative strategies and credit. In 2001, the same article says, Citadel began building an energy-trading group of traders, meteorologists and researchers.

Not every business it started has lasted. Its fund-administration arm, Citadel Solutions, was renamed Omnium in 2009 and sold to Northern Trust in 2011; Citadel Technology, set up in 2009, offered software developed inside the firm to other investment managers; and Aptigon Capital, formed in 2016, closed in 2019, English Wikipedia says. Two Bermuda reinsurers that Citadel founded in 2004 and 2005 were wound down or placed in run-off by early 2009.

Citadel also borrowed in public. In November 2006 it became the second hedge fund to sell bonds publicly to investors, in the form of senior unsecured debt arranged by Lehman Brothers and Goldman Sachs, English Wikipedia says. In 2014, the same article says, it became the first foreign hedge fund to complete a yuan fundraising under a programme that allowed Chinese investors to invest in overseas hedge funds.

A hedge fund and a market maker.

There are two companies with the name. Citadel LLC is the hedge fund. Citadel Securities is a market maker — a firm that stands ready to buy and sell securities and executes trades for retail and institutional clients. English Wikipedia says the two are legally distinct, though both were founded and are majority owned by Griffin and remain under common ownership structures.

Citadel Securities was formed in 2002, a date Finance Magnates also gave in January 2017. Peng Zhao has been its chief executive since 2017, and in January 2022 it took its first outside investment since its founding, from Sequoia Capital and Paradigm, English Wikipedia says. The same article says it trades equities, options, futures, currencies, credit and Treasury bonds, and describes it as the largest designated market maker on the New York Stock Exchange.

Citadel Securities has a regulatory record, stated here with dates and outcomes. On 13 January 2017 the US Securities and Exchange Commission said the firm had made misleading statements to its broker clients about how it priced their retail customers’ orders; Citadel Securities agreed to settle the charges without admitting or denying the findings, Finance Magnates reported that day.

The hedge fund describes its approach to risk in terms of capital allocation, stress exposure and liquidity. English Wikipedia describes a risk-management centre with 36 monitors showing more than 50,000 instruments traded in the firm’s portfolios, and stress tests run each day to simulate economic and geopolitical crises. In 2015 the former Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke joined Citadel as a senior adviser on global economic and financial issues, the same article says.

How hedge funds present themselves.

Hedge funds and quantitative trading firms sell to institutions rather than to shoppers, and most present themselves with very little: a name, a sparse wordmark and a short statement of what they do. Many take money only from pension funds, endowments, foundations, sovereign funds and other professional investors, so their public pages are often written as much for future employees as for clients.

Recruiting is frequently the loudest part of the identity. Firms in this field publish pages aimed at engineers, researchers and graduates, describe their offices and talk about culture as an asset. Bridgewater, for example, has been based on a wooded corporate campus in Westport, Connecticut, since the late 1990s, according to English Wikipedia, and describes its culture as an “idea meritocracy.” Citadel announced in June 2022 that it was moving its headquarters from Chicago to Miami, ABC7 Chicago reported at the time.

Ideas do much of the remaining work. Some firms publish research papers, market commentary or written principles; Bridgewater says its Daily Observations research note has gone to clients for five decades, and its founder’s handbook, Principles, became a book in 2017. Others are known to the public mainly through philanthropic foundations, sponsorships or an occasional annual letter rather than through advertising.

This guide sets out what can be checked about each firm — who founded it, where it is based, how its ownership has changed and what regulators have said — and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word. It reports no investment returns and gives no investment advice.

From Chicago to Miami.

In June 2022 Citadel left Chicago. On 23 June 2022, ABC7 Chicago reported, Griffin told staff in a note that the firm’s headquarters would move to Miami, calling the city “a vibrant, growing metropolis”; Citadel Securities was moving its headquarters there too. The station reported that Citadel then had about 1,000 employees in Illinois. English Wikipedia now gives the hedge fund’s headquarters as Miami, with offices across North America, Asia and Europe and more than 3,100 employees.

New York remains central to the firm. In December 2022 Citadel signed an agreement with Vornado Realty Trust and Rudin Management to master-lease a new office tower to be built on Park Avenue in Midtown Manhattan as its New York headquarters, English Wikipedia says. In September 2025 it announced that it would take office space at the top of Boston’s new South Station Tower, the same article says.

Like most hedge funds, Citadel presents itself with little more than its name. That name was itself a change: the firm traded as Wellington Financial Group for its first four years before taking Citadel, a word for a fortress. Its two companies share the word: one invests money for clients, and the other makes markets and executes trades for other firms, each from Miami.

For a design guide, Citadel shows how one name can carry two separate businesses, and how a headquarters move can become part of a firm’s public story. Compare Millennium and Point72, two other hedge-fund firms in this series. For this guide we use a charcoal, a steel blue and a pale mist with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Citadel’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.