tw0122
6 days ago
Market makers the FINEest companies out there lol. More so business as usual in the Casino where market maker money talks and bs walks.. Fines and more fines and move on to the next fine.. it’s the American way of doing the FINEest business.
Examples are infinite and FINEest
Citadel Securities paid a $115,000 fine for these 502,243 violations and walked away. Pretty crazy over 500,000 violations against retail traders and they are still in business.
The New York Stock Exchange charged Citadel Securities LLC with engaging in wash sales 502,243 times using its computer algorithms. A wash sale is where the buyer and the seller are the same entity and no change in beneficial ownership occurs. (Wash sales are illegal because they can manipulate stock prices up or down.) Citadel Securities paid a $115,000 fine for these 502,243 violations and walked away. That’s less than 23 cents per trade.
The SEC settled a case against Citadel Securities for $22.6 million in fines and disgorgements, alleging the following had occurred:
“…two algorithms used by Citadel Securities did not internalize retail orders at the best price observed nor sought to obtain the best price in the marketplace. These algorithms were triggered when they identified differences in the best prices on market feeds, comparing the SIP feeds to the direct feeds from exchanges. One strategy, known as FastFill, immediately internalized an order at a price that was not the best price for the order that Citadel Securities observed. The other strategy, known as SmartProvide, routed an order to the market that was not priced to obtain immediately the best price that Citadel Securities observed.”
More recently, Citadel Securities agreed to a $700,000 fine by Wall Street’s self-regulator, FINRA, for executing customer orders at prices worse than it traded for its own account. Citadel Securities was allowed to neither admit nor deny the charges. The activities occurred over a period of years.
FINRA fined Citadel Securities $180,000 for failing to mark 6.5 million equity trades as short sales. Citadel did not admit or deny the allegations but paid the fine.
How do the criminal hedge funds and market markets operate with illegal naked shorting.
“We did not apply or agree to have our shares traded on these exchanges, and we believe it is important to take action to get delisted and address our investors’ concerns.”
Market maker disguised criminality is rampant .. Citadel Securities was fined a total of $800,000 by its various regulators for serious trading misconduct. This is how the New York Stock Exchange described what Citadel had done:
“The firm sent multiple, periodic bursts of order messages, at 10,000 orders per second, to the exchanges. This excessive messaging activity, which involved hundreds of thousands of orders for more than 19 million shares, occurred two to three times per day.”
In addition, according to the York Stock Exchange, Citadel “erroneously sold short, on a proprietary basis, 2.75 million shares of an entity causing the share price of the entity to fall by 77 percent during an eleven minute period.”
In another instance, according to the New York Stock Exchange, Citadel’s trading resulted in “an immediate increase in the price of the security of 132 percent.”
In April 2015, Citadel issued a press release announcing that former Fed Chairman, Ben Bernanke, would move to the payroll of Citadel as an outside Senior Advisor. Bernanke presided over the largest secret bailout of Wall Street and foreign banks in U.S. history .
Barclays agreed to settle the charges by admitting wrongdoing and paying $35 million penalties to the SEC and the NYAG for a total of $70 million.
Credit Suisse agreed to settle the charges by paying a $30 million penalty to the SEC, a $30 million penalty to the NYAG, and $24.3 million in disgorgement and prejudgment interest to the SEC for a total of $84.3 million.
“These cases are SEC enforcement actions involving dark pools and other alternative trading systems. The SEC will continue to shed light on dark pools to better protect investors.
One of the latest developments in this saga is Citadel Connect, a dark pool operated by Citadel Securities.
Citadel Securities and Citadel Connect.
As the largest Designated Market Maker (DMM) on the NYSE, and accounting for 47% of US-based retail trading volume, Citadel Securities LLC also accounted for a significant portion of Robinhood’s Q1 2021 revenue thanks to Robinhood’s PFOF (payment for order flow) business model.
Pete Stock
@PeteStock11
Citadel 66B naked shorts borrowing is a systemic problem, in any other circumstances I would call for an epic short covering but Citadel book making operations like Madoff in 2008 leads me to believe when uncovered it will create a seismic shift which will destroy this market
https://twitter.com/PeteStock11/status/1618262439535185921?s=20
What is a Dark Pool and Can it Be Abused?
Alternative trading systems (ATSs) or dark pools are private exchanges that have liquidity benefits but can also obscure trades. Together with internalizers, they account for over 40% of the global equity market. Dark pools gained traction after 2005, following the SEC’s adoption of the Regulation NMS (National Market System). NMS modernized the stock market to make it as we know it today. Therefore, dark pools are completely legal and regulated.
However, they are called dark because orders don’t show up on the exchange’s order books. The obvious purpose of this feature is to stabilize the market, so that when large orders from institutionalized investors are placed other market players are not alerted. Otherwise, with the order size in the open – on the lit market – other participants would be able to trigger a downward price shift.
By preventing that from happening, dark pools increase liquidity and market efficiency. Nonetheless, the same way dark pools eliminate transparency by design, they can also obscure conflicts of interest which could lead to the market being manipulated. Here are some of the historical examples which demonstrate the ways in which dark pools have been abused:
• On October 3, 2012, SEC charged eBX LLC for failing to protect the confidential information of its subscribers, allowing third parties to use the information.
• On June 6, 2014, SEC charged a New York broker for mishandling confidential information and using it for marketing purposes.
• On January 15, 2015, SEC charged UBS Securities LLC for failing to disclose an order type that it pitched exclusively to market makers.
• On August 12, 2015, SEC charged ITG and AlterNet Securities for operating a secret trading desk and misusing confidential trading data.
• On January 31, 2016, SEC charged Barkley Capital and Credit Suisse for numerous violations, among them executing 117 million illegal sub-penny orders.
• On September 14, 2018, SEC charged Citigroup for misleading dark pool users and routing orders in other trading venues.
• On November 7, 2018, SEC charged ITG and AlterNet Securities again for similar violations as the last time.
This gives you an overview of the abuse range occurring in dark pools. With that said, as a private exchange, each private pool has its own rules and limits. For example, some only allow large orders or blocks, while others focus on high-frequency trading (HFT) which is how dark pools have grown in popularity in the first place.
The most common abuse found in dark pools is the so-called front running. With the knowledge that a trader is about to execute a trade, another trader can trade the stock – sell or buy – first and then sell it to satisfy the original request—at a profit.
Is Citadel Connect a Dark Pool?
Numerous reliable reports suggest Citadel Connect is indeed a dark pool. Interestingly enough however, Citadel Connect is not registered as an ATS, nor does it report its trading volume to FINRA, which is overseen by the SEC, per a 2015 Reuters report:
“Unlike Apogee, Connect is not classified as an “Alternative Trading System” and does not report volumes to FINRA.”
In the same article, Reuters had reported that Citadel Securities aims to shutter its previously registered dark pool called Apogee in 2015, as Citadel Connect had already outperformed it by five times. The market maker itself refers to Connect as an “off-exchange trading” or “Immediate-or-Cancel order (IOC) platform”.
It is clearly used for dark pool trading. Among its offering are the following features:
• Deep unique principal liquidity
• Minimizing market impact
• Smart order routing
These features align with the purpose of dark pools. However, the SEC Chair Gary Gensler differentiated between dark pools (ATSs) and off-exchange wholesalers, observing that:
“That leaves about 38 percent, most of which was executed by off-exchange wholesalers. Just seven wholesalers accounted for the vast majority of this group….”Within the off-exchange market maker space, we are seeing concentration. One firm has publicly stated that it executes nearly half of all retail volume.”
As you can see, the market is all about the flow of information and which entities have positioned themselves to best tap into this data flow.
“…as a significant and growing share of retail orders are routed to a small, concentrated group of wholesalers, certain market makers have more data than others.
As we’ve seen in many other parts of our economy, a few central actors gain advantage through the increasing use of data — whether in search, e-commerce, or in this case, the data from transaction flows.”
Citadel Is Paying for Order Flow from Nine OnLine Brokerage Firms – Not Just Robinhood
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: February 4, 2021 ~
Since 2000, the Securities and Exchange Commission has required brokerage firms to file a quarterly report showing where they are routing their stock trades for execution. The filing is known as a 606 report after Rule 606 of Regulation NMS (National Market System). Because so many traders at Reddit’s WallStreetBets’ message board have focused on the fact that billionaire Ken Griffin’s Citadel Securities was executing the majority of trades for Robinhood, the trading app where a lot of the Redditors directed their GameStop trades, we decided to take a look at what other online brokers might have also been directing GameStop trades to Citadel Securities.
According to the 606 reports for the fourth quarter of 2020 for the following nine online brokers, Citadel was providing payment-for-order-flow (giving a cash rebate for trade orders directed to it) to each of the following: Robinhood, E-Trade, TD Ameritrade, Charles Schwab, WeBull, Ally Invest Securities, First Trade and TradeStation. At Fidelity Brokerage Services, it was directing stock and option orders to Citadel Securities but was only receiving payment-for-order-flow on the option orders, according to its 606 report.
According to these 606 reports, Citadel ranked as the number one venue for sending both stock and option orders at the following firms: Robinhood, TD Ameritrade, Charles Schwab, WeBull, Fidelity Brokerage Services and Ally Invest Securities. Citadel was the number one venue for options trades by E-Trade while ranking lower for stock trades. At First Trade and TradeStation, Citadel ranked number one for market orders for stocks (trades with no stated price limit) and number one for options.
The bottom line here: there was a high probability that no matter what online brokerage firm Redditors sent their GameStop orders to initially, Ken Griffin’s Citadel Securities was getting a piece of the action in the end. According to the website of Citadel Securities, “To maximize trading opportunities for clients, our automated trading platform sources liquidity from all U.S. exchanges and more than 18 alternative liquidity venues.”
That last sentence is what investigators want to look at. That is, what is the final destination of all of these Citadel Securities trades. “Alternative liquidity venues” may include Dark Pools which are in desperate need of some sunshine. (See GameStop Shares: Dark Pools Owned by Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, UBS, et al, Have Made Tens of Thousands of Trades.)
Pay to play in the trading world has worked out very well for Griffin. According to Forbes, as of today, Griffin’s net worth is $15 billion. Forbes reported Griffin’s wealth at just $7.6 billion less than five years ago.
All that dough sloshing around in Griffin’s bank accounts has found some interesting destinations. Just ask U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen. Citadel paid Yellen $992,500 for speaking gigs since she stepped down as Fed Chair in February of 2018. Two of those events, on October 17, 2019 and December 3, 2019, commanded $292,500 each. Then, at the height of the pandemic in October 2020, Citadel paid Yellen $337,500 in total to speak at unspecified events on October 9; October 20; October 26; and October 27. Yellen’s disclosure form also lists a liability to Citadel of “$50,001 to $100,000,” owed as a refund for a cancelled event. Why she hasn’t paid that back yet is curious. [See updated information at end of this article.]
All of this comes from the jaw-dropping financial disclosure form that Yellen filed with the (try to contain your laughter) Office of Government Ethics in advance of her Senate Finance Committee Confirmation Hearing to become the U.S. Treasury Secretary.
Yellen’s cash haul for speaking gigs in 2019 and 2020 came to more than $7 million, with most of that coming from Wall Street firms and hedge funds. Yellen did not disclose her speaking fees in 2018.
Yellen is now rumored to be hauling together the SEC, the Fed, and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission this week to look into the trading in GameStop. In a rational world, Yellen would have to recuse herself from any matter involving Citadel. But when it comes to matters involving Wall Street, we left that rational world in 1999 with the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act which allowed giant federally-insured banks to merge with Wall Street’s casino trading firms for the first time since 1933. It’s been downhill ever since.
Curiously, The Hill is reporting that the New York Fed is also to take part in Yellen’s private meeting with regulators. The New York Fed has absolutely nothing to do with stock or options trading or online trading platforms. What it does do is electronically print trillions of dollars to bail out Wall Street when it blows itself up, while being simultaneously owned by the mega banks on Wall Street. (See These Are the Banks that Own the New York Fed and Its Money Button.)
This is not the first time that Citadel has enriched the coffers of a recently retired Fed Chair. In April 2015, Citadel issued a press release announcing that former Fed Chairman, Ben Bernanke, would move to the payroll of Citadel as an outside Senior Advisor. Bernanke presided over the largest secret bailout of Wall Street and foreign banks in U.S. history.
Fortune Magazine reported that Citadel was holding secret meetings with the Fed during the Wall Street crisis, writing on December 9, 2008 that “Then there was the most damaging rumor of all: Griffin had been holding ‘secret meetings’ with the Federal Reserve, looking for a bailout.”
Wall Street On Parade attempted to find out whom Bernanke had met with during the crisis. We filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request and waited. When we received Bernanke’s daily appointment calendar in 2014, six long years after the peak of the crisis, it remained heavily redacted, with 84 meetings between January 1, 2007 and the collapse of Bear Stearns on the weekend of March 15-16, 2008 still blacked out.
When the announcement was made that Bernanke would join the payroll of Citadel, Bernanke was quoted as follows in the press release: “Citadel is a dynamic firm with tremendously talented people and a rigorous approach to research and investing. I look forward to adding my perspective on a range of issues affecting our global economy.”
“Rigorous” is not exactly what all those fines by regulators suggest.
On June 25, 2014, Citadel Securities was fined a total of $800,000 by its various regulators for serious trading misconduct. Citadel paid the fines in the typical manner, without admitting or denying the charges. This is how the New York Stock Exchange described what Citadel had done:
“The firm sent multiple, periodic bursts of order messages, at 10,000 orders per second, to the exchanges. This excessive messaging activity, which involved hundreds of thousands of orders for more than 19 million shares, occurred two to three times per day.”
In addition, according to the York Stock Exchange, Citadel “erroneously sold short, on a proprietary basis, 2.75 million shares of an entity causing the share price of the entity to fall by 77 percent during an eleven minute period.”
In another instance, according to the New York Stock Exchange, Citadel’s trading resulted in “an immediate increase in the price of the security of 132 percent.”
Read that and then look at this chart in GameStop over the past month:
Silver Spring, MD, Feb. 09, 2023 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- BTCS Inc. (Nasdaq: BTCS) (“BTCS” or the “Company”), a blockchain technology-focused company, announced today that it has engaged Baker McKenzie, specifically their Frankfurt Office, a renowned law firm, to investigate the listing of its shares on five German stock exchanges (Munich, Frankfurt, Stuttgart, Berlin, Tradegate) as well as three other German trading venues. The move comes in response to serious concerns raised by investors over the lack of transparency and potentially detrimental effects on our share price on the Nasdaq, our primary market.
Charles Allen, CEO of BTCS, emphasized the Company's commitment to protecting its investors, particularly its over 35,000 retail investors. “Shares with primary listings outside the European Union (“EU”), including BTCS, are not protected by EU Regulations on Short Selling, which prohibits, among other things, naked short sales which would otherwise be illegal in both the United States and EU.” Allen continued “Our goal is to ensure that our securities trade in fair and transparent markets, and we are taking all necessary steps to achieve that. We did not apply or agree to have our shares traded on these exchanges, and we believe it is important to take action to get delisted and address our investors’ concerns.”
Baker McKenzie has been engaged to investigate when and who listed BTCS on these exchanges, and provide assistance in getting delisted from these exchanges. The Company is determined to provide a resolution to this issue and maintain the trust and protect its retail investors.
“Baker McKenzie is a global law firm with over 6,500 lawyers in more than 70 offices. For more than 70 years, they have helped clients solve their most complex legal challenges and achieve their business goals. With this level of experience and expertise, they are uniquely positioned to help us investigate our listing on these exchanges and provide assistance in getting delisted.” continued Allen.
About BTCS:?BTCS Inc. is a Nasdaq listed company operating in the blockchain technology
***The hedge funds been funding there nefarious naked shorting counterfeit schemes through crypto also**
First came to light with AMC and GME.
When you have time listen to the real crypto experts.
This was enlightening space call as the crypto experts got together and explained how FTX was used in the new tokenized world where corrupt market makers and hedge funds tokenize stocks outside of the US legally to naked short the crap out of US stocks with an infinite supply of tokens..Germany has been an attractive market used to short U.S. companies.. FTX was a huge donor to all Congress members so government needs distraction away from FTX
https://twitter.com/i/spaces/1MYxNgNOwnLKw
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