A trader who operated out of his West London home was arrested by British authorities Tuesday on U.S. charges that he helped cause the Dow Jones Industrial Average to plummet 1,000 points on May 6, 2010, in what came to be known as the “flash crash.”
Prosecutors and regulators charged Navinder Sarao with using a souped-up version of commercially available software to manipulate a stock-market index futures contract, laying the groundwork for the index’s decline, in which hundreds of stocks momentarily lost nearly all their value.
Authorities said Mr. Sarao, who was 31 years old at the time of the crash, earned $40 million in profits from 2010 to 2014 through alleged manipulations, including $879,000 on the day of the flash crash. His company, Nav Sarao Futures Ltd., is registered as operating out of a semidetached home in Hounslow, a London suburb close to Heathrow Airport.
Flash trading HQ (LINK)
Related book: Buffett: The Making of an American Capitalist
Andrew Smithers: Jean Tirole and the bonus culture (LINK)
John Kay on “truthiness” (LINK)
Drilling Deeper: A Reality Check on U.S. Government Forecasts for a Lasting Tight Oil & Shale Gas Boom investigates whether the Department of Energy’s expectation of long-term domestic oil and natural gas abundance is founded. It aims to gauge the likely future of U.S. tight oil and shale gas production based on an in-depth assessment of all drilling and production data from the major shale plays, current through early- to mid-2014. The report determined future production profiles given assumed rates of drilling, average well quality by area, well- and field-decline rates, and the estimated number of available drilling locations.Book of the day (a Marc Andreessen recommendation): Enchanted Objects: Design, Human Desire, and the Internet of Things