Ken Griffin, the billionaire founder of high-frequency trading firm Citadel, says that he and everyone else on Wall Street are "more and more in a winner-take-all world."
He made these comments in a rare one on one session at the SkyBridge Alternatives Conference in Las Vegas on Wednesday.
This idea was a theme in two parts of what he was saying to host Anthony Scaramucci.
For one, he meant 'winner take all' in terms of talent. He — like his fellow hedge fund manager Steve Cohen, who spoke at the Milken Global Conference in Los Angeles last week — believes that the hunt for talent is as difficult as ever.
"The one constant is that it's really hard to recruit people to any organization ... The war for talent is a constant and it's going to be constant for the rest of my career," he said.
Griffin is so aggressive about this that the night Enron went bankrupt, he said he had people on the ground scooping up one of the company's teams immediately.
The other way this 'winner-takes-all' tenet has become a part of Griffin's business is in his trading strategy. He explained that he's looking for the number-one asset in every asset class. He's not trying to find value in things the market undervalues — he just wants number one.
Of course, so do a great many other market participants.
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