Citadel's purchase of Situational Awareness's portfolio fuels Ken Griffin's record-setting July

Ken Griffin’s investment firm is the most profitable hedge fund in history, has been running for more than 35 years, and has invested in complex situations around the world.

So if the $71 billion firm is setting new records, it’s pretty notable.

Citadel had its best-ever month in its stand-alone stock-picking fund thanks primarily to its deal to purchase a bulk of Situational Awareness’s public portfolio last week. The deal, at a 10% discount, sent the holdings such as CoreWeave, SK Hynix, and Bloom Energy soaring, fueling Citadel’s gains.

In July, the firm’s stock-picking fund was up 14.2%, a record for Griffin’s firm, a person close to the Miami-based manager told Business Insider. On the year, that fund has gained 27%. The firm’s Tactical Trading fund — which blends quant strategies and human stockpickers — is also up 27% on the year through July after a gain of 11.1% last month, the person said.

It’s put Griffin’s fund at the top of the leaderboard among its multistrategy peers, many of which lost money in a chaotic July. The firm’s flagship Wellington fund — which includes commodities, macro, fixed income, and credit strategies along with equities and quant — was up 5.9% in July and 12% for the year.

The firm declined to comment.

Situational Awareness is the latest cautionary tale in an industry full of Icarus-like examples. The onetime $45 billion fund is run by Leopold Aschenbrenner, a former OpenAI researcher with no prior investing experience who launched the firm in early 2025.

Eye-popping returns, thanks to concentrated bets on public tech stocks and a large private stake in the artificial intelligence leader Anthropic, led to inflows and increased confidence. July’s meltdown was driven by juiced bets on companies that began to falter, forcing Aschenbrenner’s lenders to demand additional collateral.

To satisfy these margin calls, the young investor sold the majority of his publicly traded holdings to Citadel but retained his multi-billion-dollar stake in Anthropic. The firm plans to continue to invest in both public and private companies, Business Insider previously reported, despite a 67% loss in July.

For Citadel, the outsize gains from the deal are a welcome addition to the firm’s bottom line. The firm’s year up to July had been decent, but nothing special — up 5.7% in the flagship fund, trailing rivals like Point72 and Millennium.

Now, as peers enter the third quarter in the red, Griffin’s fund is once again at the top of its category.