Citadel Securities CEO Peng Zhao shares Olympic takeaways and urges interns to be ‘champions of capital markets’

Citadel Securities’ chief people officer, Alex DiLeonardo, and CEO Peng Zhao offered some Olympics-inspired advice to its latest batch of interns

Citadel Securities

• Internships at Ken Griffin’s hedge fund and market maker are wrapping up this week.
• Citadel Securities’ CEO and its chief people officer hosted a fireside chat with interns.
• After a company trip to the Olympics, Zhao told interns what they could learn from star athletes.

Though the 2024 Paris Olympics have wrapped up, the events have kept inspiring Citadel Securities CEO Peng Zhao.

“I hope many of you in this room will win gold in the field of financial services. I hope that the future champions of capital markets are in this room,” Zhao told the latest batch of interns at Citadel Securities, who finished up their internships this week. “In fact, that’s not my hope — that’s my expectation.”

During a fireside chat with Citadel Securities’ chief people officer, Alex DiLeonardo, Zhao offered up some Olympics-inspired career advice about fostering confidence in oneself, having ambition, and winning.

Zhao witnessed triumph live from the stands in Paris. He and Citadel Securities’ founder, Ken Griffin, hosted a company outing to watch the track and field events at the Stade de France. He also saw breakthrough athletes like Léon Marchand, Summer McIntosh, and Pan Zhanle, “swimmers I had never heard of before and most people had never heard of,” gain confidence as they competed and smashed records, he told interns.

McIntosh, 17, became the first Canadian to win three gold medals in a single Olympics. China’s Pan, 20, broke his own record as he took home gold in the men’s 100-meter freestyle. And Marchand, the 22-year-old Frenchman, set four records in Paris.

Canada’s Summer McIntosh won three gold medals in a single Olympics to make history in Paris.

Ian MacNicol/Getty Images

“They are not just Olympic gold medalists; they will go down in history as some of the greatest athletes that we have ever witnessed,” Zhao said.

As was the case with the three swimmers, age and years of experience don’t always correlate with success.

Zhao described Marchand walking into his first event “with his head down, perhaps a bit intimidated by the crowd.”

“Five days later, when he swam for his fourth gold medal, he walked into the stadium with his face towards the audience, arms open — he was like, ‘Bring it,’ and the crowd exploded,” Zhao said. “Seeing someone grow from being not sure of themselves to having the confidence of a champion was absolutely incredible.”

Léon Marchand of Team France won gold in the men’s 200-meter breaststroke.

Maddie Meyer/Getty Images

The interns Zhao spoke to are also familiar with edging out steep competition. Citadel Securities and its sister hedge fund, Citadel, have a notoriously competitive internship program. The acceptance rate for the 11-week internship program was about 0.5% in 2023, leaner than Harvard’s acceptance rate.

As a market maker, Citadel Securities matches buyers and sellers of several asset classes for its client base, which includes asset managers, banks, and hedge funds. It makes billions by using algorithms to price trades and profit from the small differences in prices.

“I really appreciated the tiny difference between the gold medalist and the swimmers that weren’t on the podium,” Zhao said. “We’re talking about tenths and sometimes hundredths of a second.”

Zhao knows a thing or two about winning. In May, he told Bloomberg that the firm was set to break revenue records this year, topping its $7.5 billion in revenue in 2022.

“Like those swimmers, we often compete to be just a little bit better and faster, and we take home the gold,” he told interns. “So remember that that’s what brought you here into this room. That’s what will bring you onto the top of the podium.”