Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.
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Notes -
BTW, I personally would recommend against joining Citadel unless you very strongly know the team you are joining is a chill one. That place single handedly generates over half the horror stories you hear about the area.
Their compensation is top notch but it doesn't come for free, you pay in terms of scarring to your heart and soul.
How does that malignancy manifest directly? Is it shitty/abusive management? Long hours? Excess length shifts? Etc.
Curious as someone coming from an unrelated but likely similarly awful field.
Basically all of them. Citadel (Citadel Securities here, I'm not familiar with the hedge fund but I've heard it's even nastier) works you worse and longer without your weekends being protected compared to other firms (of course this all depends on exactly which team you are in but the culture there is not the best, plus as you can probably tell given how different things are between different teams it's very siloed which in my book at least is a significant negative).
I had (multiple) friends who were given offers for internships with Citadel in December only to find that the person who gave them the offer had been fired by the time they started the internship in June. Also things like Citadel Securities having hired close to 5000 people between 2019-2021 when at the end of 2021 it had a total head count of 2500 people. Just goes to show you what the turnover is at that place.
Random story I heard about Citadel (this was gossip so no idea how true it is, but it sounds like the thing Citadel would do):
When the Citadel higher ups are not happy with the performance of a portfolio manager (PM) they want to get rid of him. Naturally it's possible that the dude just had some bad luck recently so they can't be sure firing him is a good idea (because they want the dude to continue to make Citadel money if he is good) but equally they don't want to lose any more money in giving the dude a grace period if he is actually bad.
So instead what they do is secretly cut off his team's access to the real markets and connect it to a mock market instead without informing the person. When the dude thinks he is doing a trade what really happens is that the trade is routed to this fake show market Citadel have created for him. That way the dude keeps thinking he is managing an order book when in reality all that is happening is that he's trading with play money no different to what you can do with one of any dozens of apps on your mobile phone.
This way if the dude is actually bad he doesn't cost Citadel any more money before they fire him. Of course if he is good (less likely than the alternative because only low performers end up in this regime anyways) all his trades where he thought he was making money weren't doing anything so Citadel does loses out on some money. But that's basically fine for Citadel because they can just reduce his bonus down to reflect the real amount he made for Citadel and not the amount he thought he had made because that was what his screens were showing him. Plus he still has his job so as far as they care, he should be happy...
That is hilarious and sad. Thank you for sharing.
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