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JPMorgan Chase cut some trading functions it provided for Citadel Securities after the firm launched a service for clients that muscled in on the bank’s business, according to people familiar with the matter.
JPMorgan told Citadel Securities last year it would no longer offer the group so-called high-touch equity trading services, such as handling trades that are not done purely electronically and pitching research for trade ideas, the people said.
The move came after Citadel Securities announced plans for its own high-touch equity business that would compete with JPMorgan. To lead its effort, Citadel recruited the head of JPMorgan’s high-touch equities trading service, Elan Luger.
Citadel Securities is a market-maker that matches buyers and sellers on trades. It was founded by Ken Griffin, who also runs the separate hedge fund firm Citadel.
JPMorgan is still offering prime brokerage services to Citadel Securities and so-called programmatic trading services. The bank’s relationship with Citadel is unaffected.
The moves underscore the occasionally fraught relationship between banks and trading firms as their roles on Wall Street evolve. For a long time, banks viewed them as clients but are increasingly considering them competitors too as they expand into new areas.
JPMorgan and Citadel Securities declined to comment.
Citadel Securities has grown into a market giant by electronically facilitating billions of trades, often acting as an unseen processor of order flows from retail investors. Banks have shied away from spending the huge sums of money required to maintain technology infrastructure for such vast trading volumes.
But Citadel Securities’ move into high-touch equities trading has put them more directly in competition with investment banks such as JPMorgan.
For this, companies like JPMorgan and Citadel Securities seek to execute large, often complex trades for big asset managers and hedge funds such as BlackRock and Millennium Management.
With the start of its new equities business, Citadel Securities had been sourcing block trades, or large tranches of a company’s shares, through investors looking to sell shares, rather than investment banks, a person familiar with the matter said.
JPMorgan co-head of commercial and investment banking Troy Rohrbaugh on Monday told a shareholder event that the bank has “a long track record” of relationships where they both compete and service firms such as Citadel Securities.
“I feel very comfortable that we can hold our own and gain share,” Rohrbaugh said. “They may gain share as well but it will arguably, in our view, be at the expense of someone else.”
Miami-based Citadel Securities beta tested its offering for high-touch equity trading last year and formally launched the business at the start of 2026.
Equities trading has been a booming business for Wall Street in the past few years, benefiting from extreme bouts of market volatility around geopolitical and monetary policy swings.
JPMorgan’s reported equities trading revenue rose 33 per cent in 2025 to more than $13bn. Privately held Citadel Securities does not disclose financial results, but the FT reported last year that its profits jumped nearly 70 per cent in the first quarter of 2025 to $1.7bn.
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