GM ☕️

Currently reading “Flash Crash”

Highly recommended book by the author of Money Ball & The Big Short.

—US stock market temporarily lost $1 trillion in value, was partly caused by Navinder Sarao, an autistic man living in his parents' London home. In a span of 5 years, Sarao made a profit of $40 million by tricking high frequency traders with custom software. by gixk in todayilearned

Highly intelligent, Sarao has the autism spectrum disorder Asperger's syndrome, and saw beating the markets "like winning a video game,"

How he made his money:

The "flash-crash trader" used specially adapted software to remotely trade on the Chicago Mercantile Index.

Every time an order was placed to buy or sell, "high frequency traders" - many of them not human but computers running algorithms - would try to make their own trades milliseconds before those orders could be executed. That way, they could be the first to make money from market changes.

Sarao realised that the high frequency traders all used similar software. That made the market twitchy - like a flock of sheep, all moving in the same direction.

His software took advantage of this by placing thousands of orders before quickly cancelling or changing them, once he had created artificial demand for other traders to buy or sell that asset.

This practice - known as "spoofing" - allowed him to make genuine buy or sell orders at a profit as the price swiftly rose or fell.

By feinting one way, he could make the market move in one direction, only for the "Hound" to disappear, nip around the back of the pack and pick up a quick profit, leaving the high frequency traders with nothing.

Altogether, he is thought to have made a profit of about $40m in the space of five years.

🧡👊🏻🍻