Samuel French has left BofA Merrill Lynch and Joseph Anastasio has left Citi to co-head high touch equities sales trading at Citadel Securities.
The firm states that it trades close to a quarter of daily volumes in US equities. According to a report obtained by Global Trading, trading revenues at Citadel Securities were US$9.71 billion in 2024.
Citadel Securities launched the high touch equities platform last November, led by Elan Luger. The initiative comes alongside the development of a data and analytics package, including a single-stock dashboard, pre-trade analytics and valuation metrics. It is expected to go live in Q1.
French’s 11-year career has been spent at BofA Merrill Lynch, where he was most recently head of NY institutional sales trading and an equity sales trader. Prior to this he was an ETF and portfolio sales trader at the company.
Anastasio has been with Citi since September 2024 as a managing director and head of North America sales trading, before which he spent more than 16 years at Goldman Sachs. His senior roles at the firm include managing director of sales and trading and vice president of the multi-asset platform.
High touch trading execution quality disclosures are not covered by rule 605 because handled orders that are manual or above 10k shares are exempt from disclosure. It is therefore unlikely public data will allow public scrutiny of this high touch desk but their clients routinely rate their execution to allocate going forward flows.
