We’re all just one action away from a life-ruining prison sentence. Imprisonment for victimless crimes is ALL THE RAGE in America these days. M. Coscia was just convicted to a 3 yr prison sentence for ‘spoofing’, a new crime, freshly made illegal by the retarded Dodd-Frank act, makes tricking adversaries in the marketplace a punishable crime.
Judge Harry Leinenweber, who tossed Mr. Coscia into prison, cited his $15m net worth and $150k monthly income in his decision, describing Mr. Coscia’s actions as ‘greedy.’
“This is a serious crime with serious consequences,” Leinenweber said before handing down the sentence. He noted that spoofing has been going on for a long time. Spoofing, which became illegal under the Dodd-Frank Act, carries a maximum of 10 years in prison. The practice typically consists of systematically placing orders without intending to execute them to trick the market into thinking there’s interest in buying or selling that doesn’t actually exist.
Bravo to Judge Leinenweber for ‘making an example’ and ruining someone’s life and being the first to sentence someone for a practice that has been part of the trading culture since the beginning of time.
Coscia was convicted by a jury in November of manipulating futures markets by placing unusually large orders he didn’t intend to execute and then filling smaller trades on the opposite side. Prosecutors said it was a bait and switch scheme that yielded Coscia, the head of Panther Energy Trading LLC, more than $1 million over 2 1/2 months in 2011. The scheme resulted in losses to high frequency trading houses that were placing and executing orders at the same time.
Jealous people always hate the success of others. When these people are in a position of power, liberties are stripped and bad things happen.
Prosecutors had sought a term as long as seven years and three months. Coscia’s lawyers said sentencing guidelines allowed for a term of only four to 10 months. His three-year prison term is to be followed by two years of supervised release.
Unfuckingbelievable.
It gets worse. Not only is he going to prison for something that every trader I’ve ever known has done, he’s paid back all of the gains ($1.4m) and an additional $3m fine to the fuckhead regulators.
What this is really about is his high speed algos were beating the shit out of someone with influence and power, causing some regulator to hone in on him and toss this modern day Edmond Dantes into the Chateau d’If.
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Sorry to ruin your panther energy party.
hahahaha. This made me laugh so hard.
[insert forrest gump photo here.]
It’s cheating at the expense of others, it shouldn’t be “normal”. Maybe now others will think twice.
Cheating whom? Oh, you mean muscling in on JP Morgan’s 100% win rate HFT desk for the past 5 years?
The law is there to protect JPM’s HFT desk. Poor babies. Sounds like this guy’s actions caused JPM to have an hour or two of less than a 100% win rate.
This is why we the people need to take back our country from the mega-banks.
Indeud. This was about protecting the high-speed algo oligopoly of a few trading firms. Poor bastard gettin all uppity trying to do the same thing.
Imprisonment for victimless crimes
Victimless crimes don’t net you a pile of money.
you don’t get it, because you’re an ideologue. Every single HFT desk on Wall Street sports unreal win rates. We’re talking about going years without losing money, even on a single trading day..
Have charges ever been levied against them? No.
Why was this man sentenced?
He was moving in on their criminal empire territory.
Two wrongs etc. Taking this fuckwit down is a small step in the right direction. But they should be taking down “every HFT desk on Wall Street” if thats what it takes. You appear to be sympathetic to them, but how many rimes have you decried, in anger, “humans don’t trade like this” or some analogue.
Fuck them all. Just because everyone knows the game is rigged doesn’t mean dick. Rigged is rigged. Fuck the establishment, no quarter.
Warhead
You’re falling right into their greasy palms. Taxes are high because multi national globalists don’t pay them. The high tax is a moat to protect their interests from competition. This guy going to jail is a fucking joke, when every IB is doing 10x worse. They’re simply getting rid of a pleb.
I agree. This is stuff similar to arresting Martha Stewart, while big banksters were robbing everyone blind.
agree 100% with you. Judge set example but only in case some HFT desk is on trial soon, they will be fined with same 3 mil. (or less – they have better lawyers) paid to regulatory.
Perhaps, unless the size and frequency (no pun) of the offenses are large and many then maybe we can see some real progress.
I realize the central casting modern trader by nature has an extremely myopic, ever shortening world view, but this shit will not go forever unchecked. Nothing ever really does. They should enjoy it while they can, since their morals don’t get in the way, but they shouldn’t remain ignorant of history. The public celebrates vigorously when royal heads roll. That can’t happen soon enough for me. But it will happen.
The only good thing about the short term thinking of crowds is that they are unable (or unwilling) to see the repeating patterns so when they are taken down, it always appears to them a cmplete surprise. Its would be comical if it wasn’t so pathetcally sad. But add alcohol and it becomes funny enough.
You have to decide whether you are angry because a guy was sentenced to prison for following the trading world’s cultural norms and not hurting anybody (“victimless crime”), or if you are angry because the big criminals of the trading world are using the law to smash the small criminals of the trading world.
Trying to do both at once scrambles the logic. Is the sentence unjust because his spoofed orders cause no harm and spoofing should not be a crime, or is the sentence unjust because bigger crooks are getting away with bigger crimes? The first option calls for the argument that there is no crime involved. The second option postulates that the trading behavior is criminal, but argues that selective prosecution of it is unjust.
This is not a victimless crime. It is not a matter of small crooks versus big crooks. That is misdirection. It is small crooks and big crooks against innocents with virtually no edge risking their capital in a heavily rigged, utterly corrupt marketplace. Is that logic clear?
With all due respect Fly, those are completely seperate problems. Tax dodging and trading without brakes are seperate issues, but equally fucked. If this dude spoofed once in the heat of battle, I would say give him a lighter sentence. However because everyone is just so complacent that anything and everything goes, it is time someone put his foot down and said ‘enough’. As ridiculously small a step this is, it has to start somewhere. Maybe another judge will find his balls hidden behind his concience, and another. I personally am sickened by how ruthless this game has become. Its gone from bloodsport to mass rape in a single generation.
Warhead with all due respect you have no idea what your talking about. At one point I worked for a company that gave me the hook up to almost every ECN and exchange in the book for trading stocks and spoofing is so prevalent it’s unreal. People put 1000 lot orders a few quotes down in the level 2 to gauge the reaction of the market. Computers load large orders at round numbers in stocks and etfs only to pull them and make trades the other way for a quick dollar. This happened all the time in TSLA due to its volatility. This guy was trying to make a living for himself. The difference between him and the guy working as a corporate shill is this guy figured out how to make $150k on his own schedule.
helicopter ben,
Does it make you feel intelligent to tell me I have no idea what I am talking about? Table manners please.
Anyway, you’re innocent until proven guilty, right? Justify it however you like so you can sleep at night.
Such bullshit… If you “spoof” the bid with large buy order and someone happens to hit you, now you own stock. There is nothing you can do about it, because it was a live bid. All you people bitching about this have clearly never seen a full book level 2
I agree with Fly on this one.
The law is there to protect JPM’s etc.’s HFT desks. This guy’s actions caused mega-banks like JPM to have a minute or two of less than a 100% win rate. So they went after him.
If we started to enforce the law, that would be okay. But this is not that. We just always continue to have the laws enforced only on small fry Martha Stewart type people only. We never get it enforced on the big criminals.
In college I had a brilliant political science professor. He said in one of his lectures that people think the law is about rules that must be obeyed by everyone. But that sometimes the law is about having a way for big Powers That Be to get revenge on people.
Some laws, practically everybody breaks routinely, if they are in the relevant situation. And the purpose of having those laws is that when a powerful person or organization wants to get revenge or screw someone over, there’s that law, and sure enough, that person they want revenge on is breaking it, just like everyone else. And then they are prosecuted.
But such laws are revenge mechanisms, not rules that everyone is expected to obey.
This is why we the people need to take back our country from the mega-banks.
If this is the only conviction we see, a one-off sacrificial lamb, or they nly take down a couple of small fish, then not only does the law have no merrit but the entire sysem has failed. I had assumed it failed before this news. If this is the tip of the spear and they are taking do easy prey to establish precedent and then go after the majors, I applaud it. I don’t honestly have any real belief that is the case. Its is not the wingle technique of spoofing I give a shit about. It is the systemic corruption; the spoof is a .22 caliber bullet in a larger war machine.
To much ink being spilled on this jerk. If he spent a little of that loot on a better lawyer, we wouldn’t know it happened. Will probably be spiked in on appeal anyway.
I don’t really understand this at all. When I first read it, I thought, “Isn’t this exactly how HFTs work?” Their business model is based on placing trades that they don’t want executed.
What exactly is the difference between Coscia’s trades and HFT firms’ practices, (other than the fact that one group has two presidential nominees in their pocket)?
This should be front=page news in business sections. If your man Trump was truly for the middle-class, free markets, anti-corruption, aginst gov’t overreach, etc, he would be all over this….
“What exactly is the difference between Coscia’s trades and HFT firms’ practices, (other than the fact that one group has two presidential nominees in their pocket)?”
That’s the difference– and of course, all that goes with that. The HFT firms and mega-banks have the entire government in their pocket and always will, until/unless we have some kind of revolution, hopefully a peaceful one.
Ott
This is not a crime and certainly not an act that deserved a 3 yr sentence and millions in fines. Moreover, I bring up the fact that none of the real HFT manipulators go to prison as an example of how unjust this decision was. Try to mince my words all you want, I will never waiver in my beliefs.
Ok, well, “spoofing” is a crime, technically, right? This guy DOES deserve to go to prison.
I do agree that in the scale of things, someone that outwits the HFTs for millions is less of a problem than HFTs that eke out billions from the middle-class’s pensions, ETFS, andf Mutual Find trades get off scot-free.
Now it woudl be so much easier to just put in a 1 second rule that prevents the quick cancellation of orders. This would get rid of HFTs and spoofers.