not even close.. why are you creating urban myths? What's the reason? First nothing can be far from the reality. Second it's not helping the poor guy.
Ah....another ET "know it all". Reality ? The reality is that Nav pulled down about $10 million in 4 years. That's proof enough for me that his spoofing algo was "Real".
False equivalence though. An algo existing/being real is not the same as "one of the most sophisticated algos in the history of mankind" which is what you said. I assure you it most definitely was not the most sophisticated algo and I'm sure Nav would agree.
This Sarao always reminds me of Ross Ulbricht of the bitcoin based Silk Road fame. For those who don't know, Ulbrict is in jail for 40 some years for running the biggest dark market drug and anything dealing website. Think of it as the Ebay of black market. At its height, he was holding 80 million bucks worth of bitcoins and when the Feds took him down, he lost all of his costumers' money too. The Feds auctioned off the bitcoins, making it rain. This dumbass was stupid enough to run the hugely illegal website from inside the USA, from San Francisco. He was living with room mates in a 1.5K rent and didn't own anything special... Anyhow, in both cases we have a tech genius, who makes tens of millions using the internet and his ingenuity, but he failed to use that profit for something good, and were stupid enough to get caught, although there were warning signs plenty... In Sarao's case, without the 100 emails complaint I doubt they would have picked him... Well, Ulbrict is already in prison for decades because they made an example out of him, and Sarao has a very good chance of joining him for at least a decade. All the money will be lost in his case too...
No Pekelo. I've seen quite a few of your post in last 2 days. You often demonstrate good insight. Only remarkably in opposite direction of the truth Sarao is an exceptional trader who made his money with an aid of a tool (which was hardly even good). It's all opposite to a technical genius - lucky guy - stupid trader theory of yours. Nothing to do with silk road at all.
I thought no-one really paid that much attention to the order book these days and it's all about volume profile? Seems to me the US govt are just vindictively looking for a scapegoat to divert blame, and prior studies have already established the most likely reasons for flash crash. In a crash like that, the smart move is to stay out of the market where possible, and not to help stabilise the market by buying, as arbitrary order cancellations later on could leave you well out of pocket?
How can you make this claim ? If it was so effective, and we know that to be the case, how can it be "hardly even good" ?
It sounds like it wasn't even an algo in the traditional sense, from what we have read it was a discretionary market manipulation/spoofing algo. Before he was arrested. I met people who saw him trade at futex that say he was a really good trader years before he even developed this algo. Sounds like he didnt even need it. Perhaps the algo doubled his profits, even if it made him 10x profits. It didnt really matter as it seems he was never going to spend even 10% of it.
You guys realize the only way to diminish spoofing is to actually allow spoofing right? If you "protect" the HFT/dumb algos from spoofers, they never have to evolve to handle it. If you allow the spoofers to force evolution, and there will be evolution, said prone algos will adapt and no longer feed the spoofers - starving them. This is an exchange play to protect HFT/big algo entities and that's it.
I wouldn't be certain of that. Spoofing is like lying.....and you know a liar can be telling the truth once in a while. Tough to distinguish between a spoof order and a real order IMHO.