About Ken Griffin
Ken Griffin, founder and CEO of Citadel, has spoken at multiple conferences in early 2026, addressing the U.S. national debt, fiscal policy, the war in Iran, and the impact of artificial intelligence. At the WSJ Invest Live conference in February, Griffin said the U.S. is "late in an economic cycle" and expressed concern that the country is "losing the fiscal space to engage in counter-cyclical spending," adding that the government should be running a near break-even budget at this point in the cycle. He also criticized policy uncertainty, stating that if "the rules of the road are going to change every couple months, I'm best off making no decision." Regarding the war in Iran, Griffin said at the Milken Global Conference and in subsequent interviews that the closure of the Strait of Hormuz could drive the world into a recession, though he argued the U.S. would be "largely shielded" due to its energy independence. He praised the president's efforts to curtail Iran's nuclear ambitions, calling a nuclear-free Middle East "really important" to global security.
On AI, Griffin described a "step change function in the productivity of the AI toolkit" in recent months, noting that work previously done by people with advanced degrees in finance over weeks or months is now being completed by AI agents in hours or days. He said this development left him "depressed" when he witnessed its impact within his own firm. However, he also cautioned that machine learning models are not well-suited for investing, which requires understanding future events rather than patterns in historical data. Griffin also discussed the importance of education, stating that "roughly a quarter of American graduates from high school are proficient in math" and that fixing the K-12 system is "a battle for the very soul of our country." He reiterated his view that higher productivity is the path to prosperity, achieved through deregulation, R&D investment, and education.
Source: AI-verified profile updated from Ken Griffin's recent appearances.
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✨ AI-enhanced transcript with speaker attribution
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Congressman0:00
It's been reported that approximately 20 percent of market volume is now attributed to retail customers, which I think is just fascinating considering that's up from 10 in 2019. And that's an overwhelmingly positive development, lying for more market liquidity, more stability, additional avenues for households to grow their wealth. And it's important to increase market access for retail customers, and I don't want to disrupt that if we possibly can. So I'd like to turn my first question to Mr. Tenef. Let's talk about the attention that this payment for order flow has received. You explained in your testimony Robinhood's relationship with market makers is important for Robinhood's ability to offer commission-free trading. So expand, if you would, on how that process benefits the everyday investor, and just expand in general on that if you would.
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Vlad Tenev0:55
Congressman, I'd be happy to. Thanks for giving me an opportunity. So as I mentioned in my written testimony, payment for order flow enables commission-free trading. Prior to Robinhood changing the industry standard model to be commission-free, most brokers collected a commission on top of the payment for order flow on every transaction. Now Robinhood routes to market makers including Citadel Execution Services. We've got seven in total across equities and options, and we route without consideration for payment for order flow. All payment for order flow arrangements are uniform across the market makers, and our system routes orders based on who provides the best execution quality for our customers. So the reason Citadel gets a relatively high percentage of our customer order flow is because they provide superior execution quality for our customers. That's first and foremost the most important consideration that we look for: how are customers getting the best execution quality? If another market maker were to improve upon the execution quality that Citadel Execution Services provides on any subset of orders, our system is set up to automatically route more traffic to that market maker.
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Congressman2:19
Continuing down this line, because clearly this is one of the things that my colleagues and the public has a very strong interest in. And having lived through Dodd-Frank before I cease, where sometimes major things can occur, I want to turn to Mr. Griffin. Could you also elaborate on how payment for order flow provides, whether it's the best price to the retail investor, from the market maker perspective? Could you expand on that as you outlined?
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Ken Griffin2:47
Absolutely, Congressman. So as the CEO of Robinhood just set forth clearly, the orders that are allocated amongst the market makers today are allocated principally on the basis of price improvement. We have fought for 15 years to make that the basis by which orders are allocated, because we strongly believe that Citadel is able to provide a better execution for retail orders in the long run. We make a huge investment in our team and our technology to do so. How is it that we are able to provide better execution quality than exchanges? Because exchanges are limited in their ability to do business by regulatory mandate. Exchanges by law have a minimum one cent wide market, which for low price securities means that they are less competitive than they otherwise could be. We're able to share our trading acumen with retail investors, and we're able to give them a better price, and we're able to make payments for order flow to firms like Robinhood that allow them to have lower or today in most cases no commission. And of particular note, we're able to help Robinhood and other brokers pay exchange fees to the exchanges at the time of execution. This has been very important to the democratization of finance. It has allowed the American retail investor to have the lowest execution cost they've ever had in the history of the U.S. financial market.
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Shepard Smith4:36
Shepard Smith here. Thanks for watching CNBC.
