Matt Levine, Columnist

Stop Triggers and Quiet Defaults

Also Uber valuation, bitcoin demand, complacency and bro culture.

November 15, 2017 at 2:40 PM UTC

Matt Levine is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. A former investment banker at Goldman Sachs, he was a mergers and acquisitions lawyer at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz; a clerk for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit; and an editor of Dealbreaker.

Provide news feedback or report an error

Site feedback:

Take our Survey

FX trading.

A fun thing to do, if you are a trader at a bank, is to trigger stops. If a customer has an order to sell a thing when it gets to 80 or below, and it is currently at 82, then you might consider selling the thing short to push down its price to 80. At 80, you know someone else will be selling, because you have a customer order to sell at 80. So you sell short at 82 and 81, and the stop triggers, and your customer pukes out her position at 80, and you go ahead and buy in your short at 80 or 79 or whatever, making a nice little profit.