Who Are the Biggest Market Makers?

The biggest market makers in US equities are a short list of private trading firms: Citadel Securities, Virtu Financial, Jane Street, Susquehanna International Group, Two Sigma Securities, and Hudson River Trading, alongside the bank desks and the NYSE floor franchises. Ranking them by market share is the wrong instinct, since those percentages move every quarter and no free public source keeps them current. This page separates the three different jobs the phrase covers, then shows you how to find out which firm is filling your own orders.

Which firms are the biggest market makers?

A market maker quotes both sides of a market continuously: a bid, the price at which it will buy, and an offer, the price at which it will sell. It collects the difference between the two, the spread, and in exchange it carries inventory it did not choose. Three quite different businesses go by that name, and the firm names only mean something once you know which of the three you are asking about. The mechanics of the spread itself are covered in how market makers make money.

Registered exchange market makers and DMMs

On an exchange, a registered market maker accepts affirmative obligations. It has to post two-sided quotes in its assigned symbols for a minimum share of the session, within a maximum distance of the national best bid and offer, on quiet days and violent ones alike. The NYSE layers on Designated Market Makers: one firm per listed stock, accountable for the opening and closing auctions and for quoting when the book thins out. Citadel Securities, Virtu Americas, GTS, and Jane Street have all held DMM books. Those quotes sit in the public order book and get matched under the exchange's own rules, which we walk through in price-time priority vs pro rata matching.

Off-exchange wholesalers

A market order for 40 shares from a retail app usually never reaches an exchange. The broker routes it to a wholesaler, an off-exchange market maker that fills the order from its own inventory at or inside the national best bid and offer, and that often pays the broker for the flow. Citadel Securities, Virtu Financial, Jane Street, Two Sigma Securities, and G1 Execution Services have all appeared as wholesalers on retail brokers' routing disclosures. This is the role most people have in mind when they ask who the biggest market maker is.

Options market makers

An options market maker does not quote an instrument. It quotes a surface: every strike, every expiration, calls and puts, on every underlying it covers, kept live and internally consistent while the underlying moves. Susquehanna, Citadel Securities, Optiver, IMC, and Jane Street are long-standing names here. The scale of that obligation is easy to underrate, so here it is counted.

SELECT
    underlying_symbol                             AS symbol,
    count()                                       AS series_listed,
    countIf(volume > 0)                           AS series_traded,
    round(100 * countIf(volume > 0) / count(), 1) AS pct_traded
FROM global_markets.options_greeks
WHERE date = '2026-06-10'
  AND underlying_symbol IN ('SPY', 'AAPL', 'NVDA', 'MSFT', 'KO')
GROUP BY symbol
ORDER BY series_listed DESC

On June 10, 2026, SPY alone carries 6471 separate contracts in the day's data, and 6471 of them recorded volume, 100% of that set. The quoting obligation covers every one of those contracts, and each quote has to stay consistent with every other strike and expiration on the same underlying while the underlying moves. A resting options order can still sit unfilled next to a live quote on a surface that size, which we take apart in why options orders don't get filled.

How much volume trades away from the exchanges?

Off-exchange trades print to a FINRA reporting facility rather than to an exchange, and FINRA publishes the volume that lands there. Measured against consolidated volume for the same stock, that ratio is the closest public read on how much of a name's trading is internalized instead of matched on a public book.

WITH
    off_exchange AS
    (
        SELECT
            toStartOfMonth(d) AS m,
            sum(daily_shares) AS off_exchange_shares
        FROM
        (
            SELECT
                date              AS d,
                max(total_volume) AS daily_shares
            FROM global_markets.stocks_short_volume
            WHERE ticker = 'AAPL'
              AND date >= '2025-08-01'
              AND date <  '2026-08-01'
            GROUP BY date
        )
        GROUP BY m
    ),
    consolidated AS
    (
        SELECT
            toStartOfMonth(date) AS m,
            sum(volume)          AS total_shares
        FROM global_markets.stocks_daily_aggs
        WHERE ticker = 'AAPL'
          AND date >= '2025-08-01'
          AND date <  '2026-08-01'
        GROUP BY m
    )
SELECT
    formatDateTime(o.m, '%Y-%m')                                                 AS month,
    round(100 * toFloat64(o.off_exchange_shares) / toFloat64(c.total_shares), 1) AS off_exchange_pct
FROM off_exchange AS o
INNER JOIN consolidated AS c ON c.m = o.m
ORDER BY month

Across 12 months, the off-exchange share sat at 36.2% in 2025-08 and 26.9% in 2026-07. Read that number carefully. It is not a wholesaler share on its own: the same bucket holds dark pool trading, negotiated block trades between institutions, and bank internalization, alongside retail wholesaling. Treat it as an upper bound, and a useful one, since the line barely moves from month to month.

Which venues actually print the trades?

Every trade report carries the venue that printed it. Aggregating one full day of Apple prints by venue shows the shape of a modern equity market: a long tail of exchanges, plus the reporting facilities where off-exchange fills land.

WITH
    by_venue AS
    (
        SELECT
            toString(exchange) AS venue_id,
            sum(size)          AS shares,
            count()            AS prints
        FROM global_markets.stocks_trades
        WHERE ticker = 'AAPL'
          AND sip_timestamp >= '2026-06-10 00:00:00'
          AND sip_timestamp <  '2026-06-11 00:00:00'
        GROUP BY venue_id
    ),
    venue_names AS
    (
        SELECT
            toString(id) AS venue_id,
            any(name)    AS venue_name
        FROM global_markets.stocks_exchanges
        WHERE asset_class = 'stocks'
        GROUP BY id
    )
SELECT
    if(n.venue_name = '', concat('Venue ', b.venue_id), n.venue_name)                  AS venue,
    round(100 * toFloat64(b.shares) / toFloat64((SELECT sum(shares) FROM by_venue)), 2) AS share_of_volume_pct,
    round(toFloat64(b.shares) / b.prints, 0)                                            AS avg_print_size
FROM by_venue AS b
LEFT JOIN venue_names AS n ON n.venue_id = b.venue_id
ORDER BY share_of_volume_pct DESC
LIMIT 15

15 venues printed Apple shares that day. The largest, FINRA Alternative Display Facility, took 38.93% of the shares, and the next, Nasdaq, took 37.55%. Average print size is the more telling column: the top venue averaged 47 shares per trade. Small average prints are the fingerprint of retail-sized orders being filled one at a time.

Who is making the market in your orders?

You do not have to guess. Every US broker publishes a quarterly report under SEC Rule 606, and it names names. The report splits non-directed customer orders into S&P 500 stocks, other NMS stocks, and listed options, and for each group it discloses the venues that received the flow. Four fields do the work.

1. The venue list: the direct answer to who makes the market in your orders, with the share of non-directed orders each venue received.
2. The order-type breakdown across market orders, marketable limit orders, non-marketable limit orders, and other orders. Brokers frequently send marketable retail flow to one wholesaler and resting limit orders elsewhere.
3. Net payment received or paid per venue, given as a total dollar figure and as cents per hundred shares. That is payment for order flow, disclosed by the broker itself.
4. The material aspects description, a written account of the broker's arrangement with each venue, including profit-sharing and volume tiers.

There is also a right most people never use. Under Rule 606(b)(3) you can ask your broker for the specific venues your own orders from the previous six months were routed to, order by order, and the broker has to answer. Execution-quality statistics from the market centers themselves come from Rule 605 instead. We walk both reports field by field in how to read Rule 605 and 606 execution reports.

How profitable is market making?

Spread capture is a tiny edge multiplied by enormous volume. The panel below takes fifteen minutes of quotes in five household names, from 18:00 to 18:15 UTC on June 10, 2026, which was 2:00 p.m. in New York, and measures both halves of that equation.

SELECT
    ticker                                                                                        AS symbol,
    round(avg(toFloat64(ask_price - bid_price)) * 100, 2)                                         AS avg_spread_cents,
    round(avg(10000 * toFloat64(ask_price - bid_price) / (toFloat64(ask_price + bid_price) / 2)), 2) AS avg_spread_bps,
    count()                                                                                       AS quote_count,
    formatReadableQuantity(count())                                                               AS quote_updates_pretty
FROM global_markets.cache_stocks_quotes
WHERE ticker IN ('SPY', 'AAPL', 'NVDA', 'MSFT', 'KO')
  AND sip_timestamp >= '2026-06-10 18:00:00'
  AND sip_timestamp <  '2026-06-10 18:15:00'
  AND bid_price > 0
  AND ask_price > bid_price
GROUP BY symbol
ORDER BY avg_spread_bps

SPY quoted the tightest of the five, averaging 0.39 basis points wide, or 2.82 cents. MSFT averaged 1.87 basis points over the same window. The SPY quote changed 200.35 thousand times in those fifteen minutes. A firm capturing a fraction of a penny per share, on a quote it revises that often, needs volume on a scale that dwarfs any single participant.

Two costs sit against that edge. Adverse selection is the first: some counterparties know more than the market maker, and their fills are the ones that move against it immediately. Technology is the second, a standing bill for co-located hardware, direct exchange feeds, and connectivity. Retail flow is prized for being uninformed on average, which is what makes it worth paying brokers to receive.

Public figures exist only for the listed firms. Virtu Financial reports adjusted net trading income each quarter as a public company, and Flow Traders publishes results in Amsterdam. The rest are private and disclose only what regulators require, so any market-share percentage attached to a private wholesaler is an outside estimate, usually assembled from Rule 606 filings, and it is point-in-time. Refresh it from the current quarter's reports rather than from an article.

FAQ

Who is the largest market maker in US stocks?

Citadel Securities is the most frequently cited, and it appears at or near the top of most retail brokers' Rule 606 routing tables for market orders. The exact share shifts each quarter, so the filing is a better source than any published percentage.

Is a market maker the same thing as a wholesaler?

No. A wholesaler is one type of market maker: an off-exchange firm that fills retail orders from its own inventory. Registered exchange market makers and NYSE Designated Market Makers quote in the public book under formal obligations to the exchange.

How do I find out who fills my orders?

Read your broker's quarterly Rule 606 report, which names the venues receiving its non-directed flow and the payment taken from each. Rule 606(b)(3) also lets you request the routing of your own individual orders from the past six months.

Do market makers trade against me?

A market maker takes the other side of your order by design, which is different from holding a view on the stock. The position is inventory it wants to unwind quickly at a small edge.

Why does so much retail volume trade off exchange?

Retail market orders are routed to wholesalers that fill them at or inside the public quote, and those fills print to a FINRA reporting facility instead of an exchange. The monthly panel above shows the resulting share for one large stock.

Every panel here ships with the SQL beneath it. Change the ticker and the same venue and spread measurements run for whatever you follow. The same questions work in plain English on the Strasmore terminal.