Nefarious Trading & Pricing

Nefarious systematic attacks

• Coordinated trading via EAs / Signals / Following.

  • lots of orders arriving at the same time pushing the market, particularly in sensitive instruments or illiquid times of day

• Sweeping the market

  • As a broker you're not getting the full order. The whole market may be getting a chunk of the same order. Did you get your order first, or are LPs already hedging their risk elsewhere?

• Spoofing particular in crosses in illiquid timezones

  • This can be a real problem from some LPs as it can unnecessarily trigger SO/SL/TP orders

• Machine-gunning, splitting a larger order up into a series of small orders and machine gunning that order in to achieve a VWAP price at the TOB price rather than pay the full VWAP price published in a full order book.

• Simplifying the abuse of incentive schemes

  • Where users collect the refer a friend / signup bonus by signing up for two accounts who place equal and opposite trades. The user maintains no risk, and collects any incentives.

• Systematic abusers. The same people/accounts are popping up the following week as a new account behind a new IP bypassing geo-ip determination and KYC techniques.