r/interesting • u/be_you_tiful- • 9d ago
Just Wow Bro cashed out way too much
A man working from his parents' house in West London made tens of millions of dollars trading futures from a bedroom filled with stuffed toys. His name is Navinder Singh Sarao, and he's on the autism spectrum.
There was no Wall Street trading floor. Sarao worked out of the family home in Hounslow, using a customized trading program on an ordinary desktop computer, and by most accounts he lived a pretty quiet life.
Then came May 6, 2010. In a matter of minutes, US stock markets plunged, and nearly $1 trillion in value briefly vanished before prices bounced back. It became known as the Flash Crash.
Years later, US authorities said Sarao's spoofing helped make it worse. Prosecutors said he placed large sell orders he never intended to fill, then canceled them, which pushed prices down so he could profit from the swings. They said his strategy was running on the day of the crash, and that he made more than $40 million from this kind of trading over several years.
Sarao fought extradition from the UK for years. He eventually pleaded guilty to wire fraud and spoofing in the US. His lawyers pointed to his autism, and the judge sentenced him to time served followed by home confinement rather than more prison time, citing his cooperation with prosecutors.
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u/samanime 9d ago edited 9d ago
Yeah. You have tons of traders out here renting office space in downtown Manhattan to put literal super computers that are physically as close as possible to be able to send trades as fast as possible, and somehow those are totally above board but this guy was able to break the stock market from a quarter of the way around the planet on ordinary consumer grade hardware...
Yeah... I'm not buying that.