Peng Zhao

Peng Zhao is the Chief Executive Officer of Citadel Securities, a global market-making firm based in Miami, United States. He joined the firm in 2006 as a senior quantitative researcher after earning a doctorate in statistics from UC Berkeley and a bachelor's degree in applied mathematics from Peking University. Promoted to CEO in 2017 at age 34, Zhao oversees an operation that executes approximately one in five United States stock trades and serves institutional clients across more than fifty countries. Under his leadership, Citadel Securities generated $9.7 billion in trading revenue in 2024, representing a 55 percent year-over-year increase that surpassed the trading revenues of traditional investment banks like Deutsche Bank and Barclays. His professional background centers on leveraging advanced quantitative research and mathematical modeling to disrupt traditional capital markets and scale global market-making operations.