Matt Levine, Columnist

Market Milking and Research Troubles

Also beta, Gary Cohn, Snap governance and bond-trading platforms.

February 13, 2017 at 2:21 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.

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Milking markets.

Navinder Singh Sarao is the guy who was arrested in 2015 for spoofing the U.S. equity futures market and perhaps contributing to the flash crash of 2010; he pleaded guilty in November and is awaiting sentencing. One fun fact about Sarao is that, before his arrest, he spent a lot of time complaining to securities regulators, sometimes in all caps, about market manipulation by high-frequency traders. "I don’t like the HFT arena and have complained to the exchange numerous times about their manipulative practices, please BAN IT," he told the U.K. Financial Conduct Authority. I once said that Sarao "seems like a recognizable type," "the sort of day-trader who whines a lot about how markets are rigged against him and how he'd be making so much more money if it weren't for those evil high-frequency traders."