apparently when the fbi started doing forensics on nav's hard drives, they found dozens of home videos he made of him trading, most of which involved him screaming / gesticulating about getting faked out by spoofers of course.

but i think im going to try to FOIA some of those videos... they are definitely still around because pretty much all the financial crime officers in training watch them at some point.

his trading style is so idiosyncratic somehow. everything i read about the exact nature of his scalping style runs completely contrary to all the current common wisdom about scalping.

like for example, the assertion he would take a 100 lot position just to scalp a point or two. i cant find anyone else on earth who does that except for HFTs. and im wondering if thats something that worked before the HFT/spoofing influx but doesnt now, or if its just urban legend, or just an accidental distortion of him building positions that he exited all at once for a tick or two of aggregate profit.


another gem... an expert was called to testify on nav's autism (fun fact you can basically do whatever you want if youre a british cybercriminal if you can prove you have autism).. that expert was simon baron cohen, couson of sascha baron cohen.


also its so wild to read about this shit because i keep feeling like this is all ancient history, but literally the day he was arraigned in chicago was the day of trump's inauguration, which made the whole event even more insane and surreal of course.

EDIT: the math here is rubbish, please see the next post below...

for fun i took a stab at working out the math here...

he had 750k and was likely given 4-1 margin, allowing him to take his first swing with 3000 emini contracts, which resulted in just about $6,000,000 cash.

at this point he took that 6m, and again with 4-1 margin bought about 24,000 eminis and longed them for 39 points, yielding 18.7 million dollars.

i think the 3m disparity between the 15m reported figure and the 18.7m on paper went to fees and especially to slippage, because if i had to guess it took a long fucking time for 24k contracts to fill, during which the market probably moved considerably.

but i really do fucking love that somehow his net exposure on this trade was never more than $750k.

wow i just checked these numbers and they are way wrong, im not sure what happened here. i think his brokers were offering him 4-1 margin and charging $1250 per emini contract, so he could open 1200'ish contracts and tolerate the market moving slightly against him without his positions being liquidated / margin called.

$750k = 1.5m leverage = 1200 emini contracts * 100 points = $6,000,000 cash value on close.

$6,000,000 * 2 = $12,000,000 leverage = 9600 eminis * 39 points = $18,720,000 cash value on close.

subtract round trip fees / rake /so on and youre left with $15m.

watching some interviews with John 'Rambo' Moulton who is an absolutely fascinating dude, less because of his success than the fact that he was really one of the last real human traders. never did the alg thing. more on him some other time but whats so precious about his testimonials is that he saw the same market changes nav saw at the same time; the influx of algs / bots stacking up the bids and asks on the ladder and vanishing to take the other side in literal nanoseconds.

also both he and nav were both apex predators, moving an absolutely huge percent of the daily volume without institutional backing.

and its a curious thing, how nav responded by essentially having illegal software written for him while rambo just kinda shifted from assuming risk to taking risk.

its a super important distinction; you go to a casino, the casino is assuming risk, you are taking risk.

rambo used to be a spread trader, he basically made markets. nav was always taking risk, never assuming, to the best of my knowledge.

i dont know, i find it really interesting. there were so few people doing the sort of volume these dudes were pushing. rambo focused on the sydney exchange, nav went for eminis.

but i think nav really understood this brilliantly/intuitively;

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H8enIZbm_yo