January 13, 2017

Citadel Securities LLC will pay $22.6 million to settle charges that its business unit handling retail customer orders from other brokerage firms made misleading statements about the way it priced trades.  The SEC’s order finds that Citadel Execution Services suggested to its broker-dealer clients that upon receiving retail orders forwarded from their own customers, it either took the other side of the trade and provided the best price that it observed on various market data feeds (“internalization”), or sought to obtain that price in the marketplace.  Rather, the SEC’s order finds that two algorithms used by Citadel did not internalize retail orders at the best price observed nor sought to obtain the best price in the marketplace.   One strategy, known as “FastFill,” immediately internalized orders at prices that were not the best price Citadel observed.  The other, known as “SmartProvide,” routed orders to market such that they were not priced to immediately obtain the best price observed.  SEC

Tagged in: Financial and Investment Fraud,