Ken Griffin’s Citadel hedge fund firm is abandoning its foray into investment banking. Internal clashes didn’t help, and bulge-bracket firms held up better than expected. As it turns out, Wall Street turf has some solid defenses. Reuters Breakingviews columnist Antony Currie discusses Citadel’s pullback with Reuters Insider’s Rhonda Schaffler.

“The whole way of setting up an investment bank takes time, patience, money and very often doesn’t work,” Currie says. “So Citadel is a hedge fund with one particular culture – you hire in a bunch of bankers who are very good at, say, Merrill Lynch or Deutsche Bank. But were they actually the best people to build a franchise from scratch? Maybe they were, maybe they weren’t. There was that, but there’s also maybe they conflicted with what the hedge fund guys wanted.”

Read the Aug. 11 HedgeWorld story on Citadel’s move here.

This entry was posted on Friday, August 12th, 2011 at 3:17 pm and is filed under Investment Banking, Reuters Insider video. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.