Ya. Assuming that ES was ~1400 or so it equates to 115k contracts. $8B/$70k (notional value of one ES fut) = 115k. $1.4-1.5MM per tick.
"According to the CFTC complaint, Taylor concealed his position by bypassing Goldman Sachsâs internal system for routing trades to the Chicago Mercantile Exchange and manually entering fabricated futures trades in a different internal system." is this realistic or do you need a secret decoder ring to pull this off?
Look at how many times it's happened. Barings was a one-off bc they were a tier 3 firm with one guy controlling trading and settlements. Kerviel (SocGen) and Obojungjbokoulu from UBS were little guys on D1 desks. Taylor was one of ten on the desk. This was easier to accomplish as the guy had some authority. I suppose the mindset was to disseminate the trades at a future date as being smaller size (per) and higher frequency; provided they were profitable. obviously this wasn't the case.
Not if they're a MMing operation. I don't really know the regs as the only desk experience I have is a long time ago and OTC.
If I was going to go to the clink for trading I would at least be trading 10mm a tick. What. A. Chump.