http://www.cbc.ca/news/business/ale...to-make-millions-in-illicit-profits-1.2899982 A Canadian man who bragged about making up to $50 million a month by running an international stock manipulation scheme using a practice known as layering was charged on Tuesday, prosecutors said. U.S. Attorney Paul Fishman said it was the first federal securities fraud prosecution of someone accused of using the high-frequency trading strategy. Aleksandr Milrud, of Ontario and Aventura, Fla., was arrested at his Florida residence on Tuesday. He faces counts of wire fraud and securities fraud conspiracy. The wire fraud count carries a maximum sentence of 20 years upon conviction, while the conspiracy fraud carries a five-year maximum sentence. Milrud, 50, was detained pending a bail hearing Friday and couldn't be reached for comment by telephone. He has not retained a lawyer. "The defendant and his far-flung network of conspirators operated an international scheme in which they generated millions of dollars in illicit profits for themselves with artificial trade orders executed at high speeds," Fishman said in a statement released by the FBI. High-speed trading probed by U.S. Justice Department Milrud recruited stock traders in China and Korea to place high-speed buy or sell orders and then quickly cancel them, known as layering or spoofing, the U.S. attorney's office said. The activity would artificially raise or lower the stock prices and allow traders to exploit the price moves to make profits on trades. High-speed traders use computers to sift through price changes and data and news feeds to buy and sell stocks in fractions of a second. They've come under scrutiny by regulators as their influence over the market has grown. More than half of stock trading every day is done by high-speed trading firms. Milrud bragged to an informant that the scheme yielded as much as $600,000 in a day and generated between $1 million and $50 million per month, authorities said. The informant, who owned an off-shore broker-dealer, recorded Milrud on several occasions describing his trading strategies in detail, they said. "The losses to investors due to this innovative fraud could be in the millions," said Aaron Ford, special agent in charge of the FBI's Newark office. Ford said in a statement that Milrud was behind a "sophisticated, international, groundbreaking market manipulation scheme that utilized an illicit, high-speed trading strategy to execute trades." The FBI will continue to seek out and investigate "frauds such as this one in order to ensure a level playing field for all investors," Ford said in the statement. With a file from CBC News © The Associated Press, 2015
If this is just another guy that possibly did all of this while living at home in his parents basement and illegally making millions (almost 600k per trading day)... Something doesn't add up.
make up your mind, are we trading too fast or are we trading too slow? What we need is another President Nixon to establish a federal speed limit
I'm getting very old and decrepit, and it takes me about an hour after I get filled to figure out what just happened and what I should put on next. I think they should require all hft to wait an hour like I do just to make things fair for people like me.
bunch of elitist media who thinks they are smart and mom and pop are scared, when it's been mom and pop who have been 100% long through 1987 and 2009 while the media tries to tell us every day why mom and pop should be scared because they think we are too stupid to realize the market doesn't always go up. We, mom and pop, are the strong hands in the market, and the media are the weak hands who continually get shaken out. hft? It use to be market makers who scalped us for an eighth of a point. Like the good book says, "Thou shalt not muzzle the mouth of the ox that treads the field."
You gotta be kidding. Mom and pop are consistently fucked over countless times throughout the years (2000, 2008). The media is used to help facilitate that as well. I don't think someone is a "strong hand" holding through 50-60% retracing market wide fire sales.
You'll notice though that not a single institutional or well known HFT firm will be prosecuted for anything significant.
we are the strongest hands in the market, and may be just plain stupid. Like Warren Buffet we have endured two 50% losses. I personally have never been "fucked over." But I have personally fucked over a lot of weak hands.