Jane Street barred from Indian markets as regulator freezes $566M

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.

I’m not sure you are seeing it clearly..or have any trading experience whatsoever. They took substantial risk. There is always someone bigger so if they were wrong they could have been buried. Then they reversed. If there are allegations of insider trading or collusion or something else then I’m ready to pile on but I don’t see anything here.

Both can be true:

- They were taking a substantial risk.

- They were manipulating the market.

“Manipulation” is what? You want to create a rule that says a firm can’t buy more than x shares/dollars/% in a certain amount of time? Or if it does it has to hold onto those shares for a minimum time? A firm should be able to buy as much as it wants, subject to its margin requirements, and then sell whenever it wants, be it one second, one minute, one hour, one day…later.