ill post more about his investments and their timelines in the next day or two.. i forget when he got into them and why but i believe it simply made him physically ill to have his money laying around earning a few points interest, and he had reached the absolute theoretical limits of what he could get into the market effectively via eminis. ... ... i guess?

like honestly i have no idea why he didnt just sack up and start value investing. aapl was trading at around $11 a share in 2011.

another minor piece of the puzzle.. he registered his LTD which provided court records showing that between 2010 and 2015 (his arrest) he had earned $42,000,000 (this was used to justify his $6.3m bail).

pieced together from tax statements, court docs, testimonials:

2007: 400k USD

june, 2008: 589,000 USD [ conflicting data: biography says 1.4m in january 2008, public filings show £461,000 in assets in june 2008 and £14.9m 12 months later. did he lose a cool mil to spoofers before turning up his own spoofing platform? its possible i suppose... ]

january, 2008: 1,400,000 USD

late summer, 2008: $3,000,000

[he quit Futex and demanded they cash out his $3,000,000 bankroll. this feels like a reliable number because of 2 things; 1) apparently he hired a lawyer to make it happen because Futex had gotten letters about him not paying taxes (!!!) and wanted to stagger out payments once they had assurances there were no tax problems looming and 2) this is coming from his boss at Futex, who really has no reason to lie here. this also casts doubt on the june $589,000 figure and backs up the january 2008 figure.]

june,2009: 21,100,000 USD

2010: 28,000,000 USD

2011: 60,000,000 USD

2015: 70,000,000 USD

so assuming the 70m figure is accurate, he made $26,000,000 in 2008/2009/2010, and $34m in 2011.

lmao ok mystery solved, he got sucked into these scams because he wanted to minimize his tax exposure. that was the pitch.

in 2009 he got suckered into a very convoluted dividend scam designed to insulate him from tax exposure via a 'soon to be closed loophole', which was the specialty of this firm he got into bed with. and apparently it worked, which of course made him assume this was just standard practice for people looking to protect large sums of money. so thats why he didnt ask too many questions when we see the transition from standard practice arms dealer caliber tax shelters into even dodgier waters.

investments:

2011: £12 million into scottish wind farms

aug 20, 2012: $17 million into the Zurich bank scam. which, hilariously, appeared to also be tied into some sort of lithium scam. again, weirdly prescient.

2012/2013: another $15m into Zurich bank scam, which fell apart because the purchase couldnt be made in untraceable gold.

2014: $4.5m into an online gambling site (absolutely dying, unbelievable)

there were also endless speculative smaller investments into shit like 'treasure hunter diving expeditions'

so yeah when he was arrested in 2015, he had about $7m in his trading accounts and $50m tied up in 'investments'

The stupidity in this is astounding how can you become so greedy that it blinds all your other logical thinking

kid wanted to be a billionaire. there wasnt going to be a 2nd place medal in that race.

according to nav, in august of 2007 he was responsible for 10,000 round trip contracts (round trip = opened then closed) a day, which was approximately 1% of the S&P 500's total volume of trades.

i absolutely do not think he was exaggerating.

even then isnt it a trait of billionaires and other very rich people to know how to game the system to save a lot of money in taxes and stuff, i am slowly really convinced he did stumble into his scheme of scalping and later spoofing by accident without any knowledge whatsoever how to handle all the money comming in, like those gangsters which end up with millions in cash sitting in a apartment and no clue how to wash it into clean money, did he really think he could skimp out on professionals you have to pay to handle all of this?

Is it just me or does this feel like he totally lucked into this moneytrain without any clue how to handle anything outside of it, like a guy finding half a ton of pure cocain and then trying to sell it himself on the street?

Nov 20, 2008, nav had a hunch that the market had bottomed. it was 2 months after lehman folded and he just felt like the US Fed was backed into a corner and would have to act. he was trading through a new broker and they watched in total fucking horror as he literally put his entire account (i believe most of his money hadnt been transferred from Futex so he was trading margin with $750,000 down) into longing the emini.

in 72 hours, the market rallied 100 points. he proceeded to use his profit to purchase more emini longs.

2 days later the market was up another 39 points.

folks... nav made $15,000,000 on that trade.

july 12, 2009, nav requests spoofing software from TT who manufacture a product called Autotrader.

around august, nav gets the first version up and running. he's spoofing up to 2000 emini bids which vanish when anyone was about to hit them.

tuesday, may 4 2010: he earns over $800k

wed, may 5 2010: he earns over $450k

thursday, may 6 2010: he earned over $850k.

important note and i forgot this detail; normally he spoofed in 5 to 10 minute cycles. on thursday, he actually just kinda threw caution to the wind and had something like $3.4 billion worth of contracts in play and was spoofing much, much, much more than usual, maybe because the market was already in a highly batshit state because of the greece riots and other global political dynamics.

in any case, he stopped trading and shut off his spoofing software at 1:41pm CT.

one minute later, the flash crash begins.

this... undermines my theory about him not being involved pretty badly, thats hard to label a coincidence. but its also really not clear how or why him clearing the ladder of thousands of spoofed orders might have triggered a total alg meltdown....

i think a more likely explanation would be someone elses alg interpreting this badly, and then creating a fucking shitstorm of nonsensical orders which the other algs sank their fangs into, creating a feedback loop. and that alg was probably running out of a prop shop in kansas iirc, we will get to that in a bit.

https://cafin.ucsc.edu/research/work...CAFIN_WP35.pdf

btw here is the paper from that reuters article

something they dont mention in the paper but its an interesting piece of trivia; they had a guy who was specifically trained to use the software they got from Barclay to spin up huge emini orders.

he was on vacation or something so they let someone else fire up program and arguably thats where things started to go from bad to extremely fucking bad.

lmao bodied