Pages

April 22, 2015

Why I Pulled Out Of The Markets

It's just too easy to use a home computer to screw over a few million people.

From the UK Telegraph:
A British man helped to trigger a £500bn US stock market crash by manipulating financial markets on a massive scale from a suburban London semi, US prosecutors have claimed. 
Navinder Singh Sarao, 37, is accused of fraudulently making £27 million by using computer programmes to create fake trades on markets linked to the Chicago Mercantile Exchange.

US investigators say he was a major contributory factor to the so-called “Flash Crash” of May 6, 2010, when hundreds of billions of dollars was wiped off the value of the Dow Jones Industrial Average in just five minutes.
 


[...]He has been charged with one count of wire fraud, 10 counts of commodities fraud, 10 counts of commodities manipulation, and one count of “spoofing,” a practice of bidding or offering with the intent to cancel the bid or offer before execution.

The DoJ's investigation was led by the Federal Bureau of Investigations, which looked at his activities between June 2009 and April 2014, but in particular focused on his trading around the 'flash crash' in May 2010.
 
It is alleged that Mr Sarao "engaged in a massive effort to maniplute" the price of the E-mini S&P 500, one of the most popular financial futures markets which is based on the S&P 500 index which includes household names such as Amazon, Boeing and Bank of America.

No comments: