This incident was caused by a penalty decision made by the US Department of Justice and the Commodity Futures Commission. Tower Research Capital, a veteran Wall Street quantitative trading investment bank, agreed to pay a record fine and compensation of $67,493,849 to the victims to solve the allegations that former employees placed false orders to disrupt the futures market.
In the statement of the US Department of Justice, three traders involved in the case interfered with the electronic contract trading of Standard & Poor's 500 index futures, Nasdaq 100 index futures and Dow Jones index futures through thousands of false pending orders, and made profits. In addition to Bruce Mao, who is still wanted, two other Indian businessmen, Kamaldeep Gandhi and Krishna Mohan, have reached plea agreements with prosecutors respectively on fraud and false pending orders, and will be sentenced in early February next year.
This punishment surprised many people. After all, the amount of punishment is really not small, but more people are concerned about Bruce Mao, who is wanted by the court. And after many comparisons, we found that this Bruce Mao is Mao Yuchun, the chief investment officer and partner of Ancheng Digital Win, a domestic quantitative hedge fund.
According to the survey data of Tianyan, Mao Yuchun graduated from the Department of Chemistry in Peking University, and then studied for a master's degree in financial engineering at the University of Michigan. He worked in high-frequency trading companies Jump Trading and Tower Research, and was the head of the first batch of Tower Research that traded S&P electronic futures contracts. Mao Yuchun used to be "the individual trader with the largest trading volume of S&P stock index futures". And once led his own team, the total trading volume reached 28 million orders, accounting for 10% of the total trading volume of this futures product, which shows that Mao Yuchun's strength is also very strong.
At that time, the Chicago Board of Trade conducted a related investigation on Mao Yuchun and Tayan Capital very early. Later, three traders involved in this matter left, and Mao Yuchun also returned to China to set up Ancheng Shuying and served as the chairman.
Many people may wonder why Mao Yuchun was investigated long ago and why he was punished only now. This is because this phenomenon is very common, especially in some stock markets, securities, government bonds, foreign exchange markets and futures markets. Later, it became more and more rampant, and even some traders have publicly talked about false pending orders.
In view of this phenomenon, regulators have to face up to this problem and punish some cases of false pending orders, especially those involving a certain period of time. Mao Yuchun's case happened at this time, so the whole world is looking for him.