This is why we have idiots coming here trying to d
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Let em come ... I love the sounds of a toilet flushing 'em down ... Whooooooooooosh
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Whistleblower Vindicated: Massive Trading Firm Knight Capital
Charged With Abusing “Naked Shorts”
By David Dayen
December 15 2016, 11:53 Back in September, I wrote a seven-part series at The Intercept chronicling how former Wall Street trader Chris DiIorio, determined to figure out how he lost a small fortune on a penny stock, came to the conclusion that gigantic market-making firm Knight Capital, now known as KCG, repeatedly violated federal regulations meant to prevent abuse in what are known as “naked short sales.”
It was an explosive allegation. Naked short sales are when you sell a stock you don’t have. That’s illegal most of the time, for obvious reasons. DiIorio found evidence that KCG had illegally conducted nearly two billion dollars’ of naked short selling
In just a small basket of penny stocks
One regulatory authority finally has, and its action would seem to confirm DiIorio’s suspicions.
The Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (Finra), a private self-regulatory organization, charged KCG on October 31 with thousands of violations over three years of Regulation SHO, which according to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) “was established to address concerns regarding persistent failures to deliver and potentially abusive ‘naked’ short selling.
Finra further found that KCG “failed to establish and maintain a supervisory system” to comply with Regulation SHO going back to 2012, when the company was re-constituted through a merger.
“So Finra is admitting that KCG never had a system in place,”
A short sale is a bet that a stock price will drop. Short sellers borrow stock shares from a broker and sell them into the market, hoping to return them to the borrower after buying the same number of shares back when the stock falls in value, profiting from the exchange.
But with a naked short sale, the trader doesn’t even borrow the stock. This creates artificial shares in a security, increasing supply and crippling the sale price.
Naked short selling is only legal for market makers like KCG
Oddly, it fell to Finra, an independent agency unrelated to the government, to enforce Regulation SHO — not the SEC, which implemented the rule and has oversight responsibility. Routine failures to deliver are supposed to lead to fines by the SEC, or even a ban from the securities markets. DiIorio has attempted to get the SEC interested in his claims for five years, to no avail. “The SEC outsourced this to Finra,” he said.
KCG did not announce the Finra settlement with a press release. Its most recent trading volume statement, for October, shows that the vast majority of its shares traded continue to be in the primary penny stock market exchanges, OTC Bulletin Board and OTC Market. Sophie Sohn, a spokesperson for KCG, said the company had no comment on the settlement