Long reads
These are longer pieces on how manipulation works in practice: case teardowns, the forensics of detection, the distinctions people get wrong, and analysis of this site's own enforcement data. Each links out to the technique pages and case records behind it.
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Paid to make a market that was not there: the crypto market-maker cases
In October 2024 the SEC and the Department of Justice charged four crypto market makers with selling the same thing to many token issuers — trading with themselves to make a token look busy. Three of them were charged over offers to wash trade a token the FBI itself created. What the record shows about how common that was, and what it does not.
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More than half of this library is not market manipulation
A count of what the library's 2,428 enforcement records are actually about, by regulator and by technique family — and why the answer changes what the headline number means.
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Hack to trade: press releases stolen before they were published
In hack-to-trade cases nothing false is said to the market, so they are not manipulation. But the missing lie is why a court had to decide whether stealing information counts as deception under the securities laws, and the answer has limits.
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Mismarking: when the price is a number someone types
Mismarking does not move any market price. It corrupts the value a fund, a bank or a lender sees. The library's fifteen records show two different kinds of case, and the best-known related matter, JPMorgan's London Whale trading, turns out not to be about marks at all.
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Why the SEC fined eleven celebrities for a tweet
Floyd Mayweather, Kim Kardashian, Paul Pierce and six others were not charged with fraud or manipulation. They were charged with a 1933 disclosure statute for not saying who paid them and how much — and the civil penalty on top of the disgorgement grew sharply between the 2018 cases and the 2022–23 ones.
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The takeover bid that was never real
A takeover bid is the most price-sensitive thing a stranger can say about a company, and the SEC's records show it being counterfeited through EDGAR filings, wire press releases and, once, a New York Times advertisement.
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How a stranger's brokerage account becomes someone else's pump
Four SEC matters, from 2016 to 2025, allege that hijacked retail brokerage accounts were used to buy stocks so the perpetrators could sell into the rise. The record supports a two-sided harm, and a more mixed story about lone actors turning into networks than the tidy version.
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The anti-manipulation rule you can break without intending anything
SEC orders under Rule 105 of Regulation M say the rule applies irrespective of intent, so an order is not a finding that anyone meant to manipulate a price. This library holds 84 records under it, mostly from two 2013 and 2014 sweeps, and the record shows what the rule catches and what it does not.
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How spoofing actually gets caught
The surveillance forensics behind order-book manipulation cases — which measures matter, which produce false positives, and why the strongest evidence is a conditional probability.
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Anatomy of a spoofing case: what the enforcement record actually contains
A close reading of how spoofing prosecutions are actually built, using the enforcement records in this library rather than the narrative versions.
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Is short selling market manipulation? The honest answer
Short selling is lawful, useful and constantly described as manipulation. Here is where the line actually falls, and what the enforcement record shows about how often it is crossed.
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The Hunt brothers and the silver corner, explained properly
The most famous attempted corner in modern markets, and what it teaches about why corners are easy to build and nearly impossible to exit.
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Pump and dump has moved to Telegram
The mechanic has not changed since the 1920s stock pools. The distribution channel has, and the change made the fraud cheaper to run and far easier to prove.
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What LIBOR rigging teaches us about benchmark design
The benchmark scandals were not a failure of imagination. The vulnerability was described before it was exploited, and the fix was structural rather than punitive.
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Spoofing enforcement since 2015, charted
What this library's own records show about how spoofing and layering enforcement has actually developed, and what the numbers cannot tell you.
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Manipulation, insider trading and fraud: the distinctions that matter
Three things that get used interchangeably, are not the same, and attract different statutes, different burdens of proof and different victims.