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518 points bwfan123 | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.413s | source
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cs702 ◴[] No.44483909[source]
According to Indian regulators, every trading day Jane Street would:

1) buy large volumes of stocks and/or stock futures that are part of an index tracking India’s banking sector, early in the day,

2) subsequently place large options trades, betting that the index would decline or volatility would spike later in the day, and

3) later in the day, cash out of the large long positions, dragging the index lower, making far more money on the options trades than on the long positions.

Jane Street can and likely will claim the firm was only arbitraging away pricing inefficiencies, nothing more, nothing less. It was just business as usual, etc., etc.

However, given the scale of the operation, Jane Street's actions sure look like textbook market manipulation. Calling it like I see it.

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1. seanhunter ◴[] No.44489362[source]
Seems pretty straightforward depending on what large means here. When I worked in an algorithmic execution business of a broker, we had to always cap our order size as a percentage of average trade size and also cap our participation so we couldn’t ever be more than a certain % of the total market volume. This was precisely so that we wouldn’t ever push the market in the way JS are accused of doing here.

If you’re trading a large % of the market volume or your orders are large relative to anyone else, you can’t claim to be arbitraging as you are executing way beyond the capacity of any kind of arb. You’re just doing the old fashioned abusive market corner in fancy clothing.