Who is buying protection
Which large funds are carrying serious downside protection, and which are leaning the other way?
One fund in our set discloses over $200bn of notional put exposure. Several large multi-strategy funds carry substantially more puts than calls, which is a posture, not a trade.
Disclosed put exposure
Computed live from our database when you loaded this page. Nothing here is hand-typed, so nothing here can go stale.
| Fund | Puts | Calls | Put lines |
|---|---|---|---|
| CITADEL ADVISORS LLC | $216.9bn | $247.8bn | 2,943 |
| MILLENNIUM MANAGEMENT LLC | $67.6bn | $34bn | 675 |
| TUDOR INVESTMENT CORP ET AL | $21.5bn | $13.3bn | 916 |
| D. E. Shaw & Co., Inc. | $19.1bn | $18.8bn | 544 |
| Point72 Asset Management, L.P. | $9bn | $10.8bn | 732 |
| MARSHALL WACE, LLP | $5.1bn | $1.7bn | 217 |
| Elliott Investment Management L.P. | $4bn | $0.2bn | 12 |
| TWO SIGMA INVESTMENTS, LP | $1.8bn | $1.5bn | 407 |
| SOROS FUND MANAGEMENT LLC | $1.7bn | $0.1bn | 6 |
| CHECK CAPITAL MANAGEMENT INC/CA | - | $1.8bn | 0 |
Live from our database. 10 rows shown.
- Sum of the reported value of positions flagged as puts and calls in the Q1 2026 filings, by fund.
- Funds with under $1bn of total options exposure are excluded.
- This is the single most easily misread table on the site. A 13F reports the NOTIONAL value of an option position, not the premium paid or the actual risk taken. A large put line can be a hedge, a spread, a market-making inventory, or one leg of something far more complicated.
- A fund with enormous puts is not necessarily bearish. Citadel is a market maker: it takes the other side of what clients want, and its book reflects their positioning as much as its own.
- Do not read this as a forecast. Read it as evidence that the largest institutions hedge, extensively, and that anyone telling you they are 'all in' has not read a filing.
Free to quote, chart or republish with attribution. Cite as: SteadyShares, Who is buying protection, https://steadyshares.com/research/who-is-buying-protection. If you are a journalist and want the underlying query or a different cut of the data, ask and we will run it.
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Educational information, not financial advice, and not a recommendation to buy or sell anything. A late regulatory filing is a paperwork failure and nothing more: we make no allegation of wrongdoing against any person named on this page.
