Matt Levine, Columnist

Lots of Things Can Look Like Manipulation

But someone can find out for sure.

April 19, 2018 at 10:30 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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This post originally appeared in Money Stuff.

There's a classic form of market manipulation where you own a derivative on, say, gold, and it pays out 1,000 times the price of gold at a particular time, and you go into the market and buy 100 ounces of gold at that particular time to push the price up, and if you overpay for the gold by $5 and it pushes the price up by $5, then you lose $500 on your gold and make $5,000 on your derivative, and so it is worth it, but it is generally considered to be cheating, when you put it like this.