It'hard to judge someone like him. I am sure he was kind of a hero at Futex at the time. Spoofing was hot. Everybody( including on ET ) was bragging about it. IMO he made 3 errors : - His tax evasion scheme. This is so antisocial to maintain a poor appearance to trump authorities. - His bravado with regulators. In 2008 he was 29. I can picture myself telling the exchange to "kiss my ass" at 22 but not at 29. - He didn't stop when it became obvious regulators were after spoofers. That is just plain stupid. I wouldn't like to be in his boots now... I think he will be jailed for a long time.
Interesting article. Re: "using commercially available software".... I wonder on what platform and which broker he was placing his orders ?
As far as I know the real problem was not selling pressure, but withdrawal of liquidity by so called "market makers" that aren't really what they claim to be as they don't have to post liquidity at all times...
The interesting thing not mentioned here is why no one is mentioning other stocks who dropped even more sharply, e.g. Accenture that went down to a penny? Who is to blame there? Not a single word!
Just wait until the talibans and ISIS set up HFT firms, then you'll definitely see the VIX spike! :-/
re: "Surely this is bullshit. My guess would be big guns punishing small guy as an example. message is don't fish in our part of the pond.." This is so easily remedied by the exchanges: charge for cancellation orders or throttle them or put a timer on the original order to prevent cancellation within xx minutes.