The 'Hound of Hounslow' spared jail after causing $1 Trillion stock market crash

[ReedeFox]

Not sure if you’ve ever heard of Navinder Sarao AKA The Hound of Hounslow but the story recently came to my attention and it’s pretty fascinating.


 
42-Navinder was arrested back in 2015 from his bedroom where he lived with his parents’ in Hounslow, after he caused a huge crash to the US stock market. Navinder was the one who triggered the “flash crash” which caused financial markets to plummet. In this case it wiped almost $1 trillion shares before markets recovered. However, by this time Navinder had already made a tidy little sum of £30 million and earned himself the name - The Hound of Hounslow Here’s how the BBC explained how Navinder did it:  
 

On this 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.

 
Well that makes no bloody sense to me but maybe it does to you. Navinder didn’t even think much of causing the stock prices to fall by a TRILLION dollars, but that’s not because he’s a cold-hearted criminal, but because he’s highly autistic. For him, playing the stock market was just like ‘beating a video game’. He wasn’t even bothered about spending the money either as he only spent £5000 of his £30 million on a used Volkswagen, which he then dumped in the middle of the road when he saw a ‘road closed’ sign. 

 

Thankfully the judge took his autism into account and spared him jail. He also provided “extraordinary cooperation” to the government in identifying other market trader cheats. Here’s a breakdown of you want to delve further:

 
Again, this is all confusing as fuck to me. Proper fascinating story though.

[StrumSolo]

Got to say I am very on board with yer man's style.

[ReedeFox]

He's a bit of a legend isn't he. This story needs to get turned into a film