Final two installments in the series have been posted . . . the claim is made that UBS was involved in trading penny stocks in some complicated tax shelter/money laundering scheme. Knight and UBS were trading all the same penny stocks, and were on opposite sides of the trade? UBS was long and Knight was short?. I don't know, maybe? Not clear on how the scam worked exactly. Knight actually seems to have a pretty good business model . . . being short all of this dreck while also collecting the spread/commisions on billions of shares traded seems like a good business. I suspect that's how IBKR makes a lot of money (high commissions on penny stocks).
To be clear naked longs are the problem-in the US people buy stocks on margin 200%-this is insane, get rid of that particular nonsense and start valuing the market on its merits. I am opposed to naked longs-there is no reason to buy on margin, it's just another Ponzi scheme Hower the forums here seem to be mostly about shadenfreude-delighting in others' misery.
is there 200% margin? I thought margin was limited to 100% initial margin overnight and 300%-400% intraday. FX lexerage is much higher and befoer the depression I think stock leverage was like 10x. Frankly 1x leverage doesn't seem like much, it's very conservative.