Most work places have policies about using work equipment including computers for personal business. Whether the equipment is in your home or in the office does not change the policies. But yes I don’t see what they could do to him now that he’s quit already. Unless his activities could be linked to MassMutual losing money in the GME drama. That would make the whole story really popcorn-worthy.
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When the regulators come calling, remember the old police saying -
You May Beat the Rap, But You Can’t Beat The Ride
Did I mention I knew some guys who got a few $M in securities legal defense before the securities regulators accusing them of market manipulation realized they’d typo’ed the account number and it was some other hedge fund doing the manipulation? No refunds, no apologies.
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Did I mention I knew some guys who got a few $M in securities legal defense before the securities regulators accusing them of market manipulation realized they’d typo’ed the account number and it was some other hedge fund doing the manipulation? No refunds, no apologies.
How do you rack up that much in legal defense in the time it takes to determine a typo’d account number?
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Gme up up up 
You sure don’t want to talk to the criminal side of the regulators without knowing exactly where you stand. So lots of defensive prep, forensic accounting of all your trades preemptively to figure out what might be the problem and whether it could qualify as manipulation (which is hard because very little of the legal definition of manipulation is hard criteria instead of being up to the prosecutors opinion), etc.
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Either all the legal and Wall Street dramas on TV are complete lies, or this doesn’t actually work the way you describe. One should be able to hire a defense attorney (does not cost millions up front) and talk to the criminal side to see what they got. It’s innocent until proven guilty. You shouldn’t have to do anything until you know what you’re being accused of. And a mil sounds way too much for forensic accounting unless it was extremely complex and required a very, very, very long time to complete. This story sounds unreal.
Or I suppose maybe he did have something shady going on and got so scared that it was worth it.
Remember these guys can make a small % of all trades on the exchanges and have been for years - that’s a ton of trades and even more data when you have to pull up the historical market data and order book quotes around every trade to see if it might have “looked bad”. And the hedge fund owners have a greater risk (reputational, regulatory) than the traders that stand accused so they are likely to err on the side of a very very extensive defense since, among other things, they can bill the trader’s profits for it. Bad incentives in a tough situation.
Not when it comes to regulators - you don’t get a trial. They’ve decided you’re an easy mark and they are going to extract a big fine and a nice win for their resume and you will have to either pay up and settle or pay a ton to defend yourself. Remember the young guy in his moms UK basement that caused the whole “flash crash”? Yeah, right. Some rare market instability happened and they had to find someone to blame to attempt to “restore confidence”.
Sarao pleaded guilty to one count of electronic fraud, and one count of “spoofing” - which is illegal in the US. He initially faced 22 charges, which carry a maximum sentence of 380 years.
Do that sound like a fair process? It’s not even clear the stuff they claimed he did (a certain type of trading where your intent when you place the order, impossible to know, is a key to the legality) was even illegal in the UK, but they extradited him to the US. Then facing life in jail he settled and admitted “guilt”. On a completely unrelated note, he was so smart that he lost nearly all his trading profits to other fraudsters/scams, so he didn’t have enough money to mount a good legal defense.
When it comes to hedge funds, the regulators have tons of power. They can threaten to audit all your clients to get them to leave, destroying your business. They can tell the exchanges your a Bad Person and that they should ban your firm from trading. These are the kinds of implied or outright actions they can and have used to force you to admit guilt and/or settle for 8 figure payoffs.
Don’t kid yourself they know enough about markets to understand why something like the flash crash happened or the difference between illegal manipulation of markets vs providing liquidity with rapidly adaptive models. If they knew enough to tell those things, they’d be rich running their own hedge fund and not punching the clock for the Feds.
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Surely after they present evidence, not before? The problem with the guy in the example you mentioned is he didn’t have enough money to defend himself. The some guys you knew had money, they just chose to spend it too soon. Even when the regulators don’t know everything, they must have something to charge you with, right? So a wait-and-see to at least make sure they don’t screw up the account number sounds reasonable.
Yeah they love scapegoats because it makes the situation seem like a simple morality story and resolved. The evil villan is gone now, so the markets are safe and sound.
That’s why I would be worried for Mr. Gill. There are going to be billions in losses from retail investors that thought they are going to get rich quick. They will turn into a pitchfork mob that is going to sue, contact regulators, and look for someone to blame other than themselves when all the air comes out of this bubble.
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You misunderstand the nature of the allegation of market manipulation. It’s manipulation if the regulator says it is, and then it’s up to you to convince them they’re wrong. And good luck with that barring something as obvious as the wrong account, since the regulators are notorious for only taking cases they think they can easily win and why would they give up a case they think they can win? Alternatively you can convince them you’re too important (pull some strings to get their boss to make them drop the case) or too hard since you will argue with them legally for too long it will look bad for them, ie they’re wasting resources on a case that may not win and in any event will get closed and credited to their successor and not them.
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More on the human side and psychology behind some of the WSB / GameStop participants.
It seemed to me like the first people to promote GME were value investors just trying to make money.
Much later on some more sophisticated investors came along and promoted the stock with a morality narrative against Wall Stress that the media loved. They knew how to play on people’s emotions to help pump up the stock.
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Yes I posted on another forum about shorting and was shot down by the “morality” police about helping “evil”. What’s with the morality police in Finance? They need to watch Wall Street the movie.
Why not Zoolander and Home Alone 2?
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LOL 
I was referencing Greed is Good but your reference is funnier
I don’t remember him in Zoolander?
Sad thing is shorts help the market by providing liquidity and ensuring stocks don’t get overpriced. Now that shorts are going to leave the market it will expose investors to pump and dumps, frauds, and overpriced stocks. Ultimately they’ll get stuck with lower returns and losses.
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Agreed they’re the pressure release valve/ predators/sharks of the ecosystem. Easy to demonize though
Matt Levine again
Last week I imagined a venture capitalist blogging about GameStop in 2027, writing “The thing I like about GameStop is not its underlying cash flows, but the fact that it is a scarce digital store of value.” I was kidding, but one thing that I have learned in recent years is that everything is simultaneously a joke and serious.
Also Elon Musk tweeted about GameStop, and the way finance works now is that things are valuable not based on their cash flows but on their proximity to Elon Musk.
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content://atws.fileprovider/document/atws_news_REUTERS%240e658341.html
“A Reddit user who claimed in a post a month ago to be a Tesla Inc <TSLA.O> insider and knew about the electric car maker’s purchase of bitcoin said on Tuesday that his assertions were not true.
The user’s original post https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/kpc8gw/you_heard_it_here_first_our_company_just_bought stating Tesla was buying bitcoin drew little attention when it appeared Jan. 2. But it received a second look Wednesday, a day after the electric carmaker and its CEO Elon Musk disclosed a $1.5 billion investment in the cryptocurrency that sent bitcoin to fresh highs.”
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Either (1) his original post was accurate and he’s denying to avoid getting fired, or (2) he was trying to pump up the value and coincidentally his statement turned out to be true.
I’m guessing #2. If #1 were the case, nothing good would come from sharing publicly, just buy BTC and wait; if they really wanted to intervene, they should’ve tried to depress it and buy at a discount.
If it were #2, why back away from it now that he’s got some cred? Keep it up and he could manipulate BTC at least once or twice more.
People are stupid, so who knows.
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