That's... working as intended?
> market makers provide a required amount of liquidity to the security's market, and take the other side of trades when there are short-term buy-and-sell-side imbalances in customer orders. In return, the specialist is granted various informational and trade execution advantages.
You can argue such a system is inegalitarian or whatever, but if you want a reliable provider of liquidity that won't instantly vanish when there's market turmoil (ie. when you need it the most), there has to be some mechanism to compensate market makers.
its a scam and is a reason how Citadel makes $30,000,000,000 profit per year
Where are you getting "$30,000,000,000" (billion) in profit? Wikipedia says they only made $6.3 billion in revenue in 2023. Moreover, they were in existence for 22 years. Even if they only started "counterfeiting shares" in 2021, $30B in profit per year (so $90B in the past 3 years) seems absurd for only $60B worth of "counterfeiting shares" on their balance sheets.
Citadel gross trading profit totalled $28bn last year,
60B is a balance at a specific date 12/31/2022, they trim the balance by the EOY and harvest losses.
the average balance is much bigger and fluctuates heavily given market demand.
UPD: I stand corrected, the market making arm only made meager $5,000,000,000 for the 6 months, so more like 10,000,000,000/year, not 28
https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/citadel-and-jane-street-set-...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citadel_Securities
The market maker boogeyman is Citadel Securities, not Citadel LLC.
Not that others won't naked short also, it is just they do not do it openly.