Editorial policy
This site describes any unresolved enforcement action as an allegation, distinguishes allegations from findings throughout, updates pages when a matter is dismissed or resolved in a respondent's favour, and logs every correction publicly.
The rule that governs everything else
An allegation is not a finding, and this site never blurs the two.
A regulator filing an action is asserting something it intends to prove. It has not proved it. Most enforcement actions settle without any admission, which establishes an outcome rather than a fact. Some are dismissed. Some are lost.
Every page on this site is written to reflect that. Where a case’s status is filed, the layout
renders an allegations notice above the narrative, and the language used is “alleged”, “accused” or
“charged” — never “committed”, “guilty” or “defrauded”. This is enforced in the templates rather
than left to the writer, and a validation step fails the build if a case narrative uses
finding-language inconsistent with its recorded status.
How cases are selected
The library records enforcement actions that involve market manipulation as this site defines it: conduct that interferes with the honest formation of a price.
Actions are ingested from the regulator indexes listed on the sources page, and each is classified against the technique taxonomy by keyword rules run over the regulator’s own release text. An action that scores no technique tag is logged and not recorded, because this is a manipulation library rather than a mirror of any agency’s full enforcement programme.
The consequences of that choice are worth stating:
- This is not a complete record of any regulator’s enforcement. Insider trading, accounting fraud, adviser misconduct and Ponzi schemes appear only where they intersect a manipulation technique.
- The classifier will miss things. An action described in unusual language will not match the keyword rules and will be silently absent. We do not know the size of this gap.
- The classifier will also over-include. A release that mentions a technique in passing may be tagged with it.
Both failure modes are why every case page links prominently to the primary document, and why records that have not been checked by a person carry a visible marker saying so.
How technique tags are assigned
Technique tags are ours, not the regulator’s. Agencies charge statutory provisions — Section 10(b), Rule 180.1, Section 9(a)(2) — not technique names. Mapping a charged provision and a described course of conduct onto a named technique is an editorial judgement, and it is one this site makes explicitly rather than pretending the taxonomy is given.
Tags are assigned by keyword rules with weights, published at
data/technique-keywords.json in the repository. A tag is applied at a score threshold, flagged for
human review below it, and not applied at all below that. Everything is logged.
A case tagged with several techniques appears in the statistics for each. This means that summing across technique pages double-counts, which is why the site never presents such a sum.
Review status
Records are written with reviewed: false and are published in that state.
This is a deliberate choice, and there is a real trade-off in it. Publishing an unreviewed record risks propagating an extraction error. Not publishing it means the action is invisible until someone gets to it, which for a growing library means indefinitely. We judged that a record clearly marked as machine-extracted, with a prominent link to the primary source, is more useful than absence and less risky than an unmarked one.
Unreviewed records render a notice saying so. Reviewed records do not. The distinction is also carried in the JSON export, so anyone using the data can filter on it.
What happens when a case resolves
Dismissals and acquittals are published above the fold. Where a case is dismissed, the case page renders that outcome at the top, before the narrative describing what was alleged. The same is true on any person page linked to it. This is the one place where the site deliberately breaks its own reverse-chronological logic, because a reader who lands on the page and leaves after two sentences should leave knowing the allegation did not stand.
We keep dismissed matters online rather than deleting them. Deleting a page makes the original allegation harder to find but does not remove it from the internet; keeping the page with the outcome on it is the only version that actually corrects the record.
Settlements are described as settlements. A consent judgment entered without admission is
recorded as settled, and the site does not describe the underlying conduct as established.
Sourcing and quotation
Every factual claim about a case traces to a primary document, linked on the page.
No release text is copied onto this site. The summaries and narratives on case pages are composed from the structured fields extracted from a release, not from its prose. Where quotation is genuinely necessary because exact wording is legally load-bearing, it is limited to a short phrase and attributed. This holds even though US federal releases are government works and not subject to copyright — the reason is accuracy and independence, not licensing.
Where our summary and the primary document disagree, the primary document is right, and we say so on every case page.
Language
Plain English. Terms are defined on first use and linked to the glossary. Figures are given with their units and their basis. Where a number is a lower bound, it says so.
The site does not use “shocking”, “brazen”, “massive” or similar. Enforcement records are interesting enough without adjectives, and a reference work that editorialises about defendants is less useful and less fair.
People pages
Pages about individuals are limited to people named in publicly filed regulator or court actions, and to legal, case-linked facts, each carrying a source URL.
No addresses. No contact details. No photographs. No employment beyond what a filing states. No speculation about anyone’s motives, finances or private life. Every such page carries a standing note that allegations are allegations, and links to any dismissal or acquittal we hold.
Corrections
Errors are fixed and logged publicly at /corrections/, with the date, what was wrong and what changed. We do not edit silently. A reference work that revises itself invisibly cannot be relied on.