Blog Archive: July 2009

See if you can figure this one out: if you are extremely rich and influential, then you can receive market news before the general public, and legally trade on it. What?! The service provided to these traders, known as "flashing," allows them to view orders submitted to exchanges, like the Nasdaq, before they are actually placed on the open market. The time period to review the information before the trade is placed is very short, fractions of a second, but enough time for an automated comput...

"Concerted rings" located in Eastern Europe and Asia have been identified as the perpetrators of complex market manipulating fraud schemes. The schemes involve criminals gaining access to individual brokerage accounts, or opening accounts with stolen identities. One permutation involved using compromised accounts to buy up shares of infrequently traded stocks to inflate their value, and then selling shares of the stock the criminals owned in their personal accounts that had been purchased at ...