![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.technologyinvestor.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/10\/HankPanky.jpg\")
<\/p>\nThis is the headline<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
And this is the story which was just posted on Vanity Fair’s web site:<\/p>\n
In the last 10 minutes of trading at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange on Friday, September 13, someone got very lucky. That\u2019s when he or she, or a group of people, sold short 120,000 \u201cS&P e-minis\u201d\u2014electronically traded futures contracts linked to the Standard & Poor\u2019s 500 stock index\u2014when the index was trading around 3010. The time was 3:50 p.m. in New York; it was nearing midnight in Tehran. A few hours later, drones\u00a0attacked<\/a>\u00a0a large swath of Saudi Arabia\u2019s oil infrastructure,\u00a0choking off production<\/a>\u00a0in the country and sending oil prices soaring. By the time the CME next opened, for pretrading on Sunday night, the S&P index had fallen 30 points, giving that very fortunate trader, or traders, a quick $180 million profit.<\/p>\n It was not an isolated occurrence. Three days earlier, in the last 10 minutes of trading, someone bought 82,000 S&P e-minis when the index was trading at 2969. That was nearly 4 a.m. on September 11 in Beijing, where a few hours later, the Chinese government announced that it would\u00a0lift tariffs<\/a>\u00a0on a range of American-made products. As has been the typical reaction in the U.S. stock markets as the trade war with China chugs on without any perceptible logic, when the news about a potential resolution of it seems positive, stock markets go up, and when the news about the trade war appears negative, they go down.<\/p>\n The news was viewed positively. The S&P index moved swiftly on September 11 to 2996, up nearly 30 points. That same day, President\u00a0Donald Trump<\/strong>\u00a0said he would\u00a0postpone<\/a>\u00a0tariffs on some Chinese goods, and the S&P index moved to 3016, or up 47 points since the fortunate person bought the 82,000 e-minis just before the market closed on September 10. Since a one-point movement, up or down, in an e-mini contract is worth $50, a 47-point movement up in a day was worth $2,350 per contract. If you were the lucky one who bought the 82,000 e-mini contracts, well, then you were sitting on a one-day profit of roughly $190 million.<\/p>\n A week earlier, three minutes before the CME closed on September 3, someone bought 55,000 e-mini contracts, with the index at about 2906. At around 9 p.m. in New York\u20149 a.m. in Hong Kong\u2014the market started moving and kept rallying for the next six hours or so, reaching 2936.\u00a0Around 2 p.m.<\/a>\u00a0in Hong Kong\u20142 a.m. in New York\u2014Carrie Lam,<\/strong>\u00a0the Hong Kong leader,\u00a0announced<\/a>\u00a0that she would be withdrawing the controversial extradition bill that had been roiling the city in protest for months. Whoever bought those e-mini contracts a few hours earlier made a killing: a cool $82.5 million profit.<\/p>\n But these wins were peanuts compared to the money made by a trader, or group of traders, who\u00a0bought<\/a>\u00a0420,000 September e-minis in the last 30 minutes of trading on June 28. That was some 40% of the day\u2019s trading volume in September e-minis\u2014making it a trade that could not easily be ignored. By then, President Trump was already in Osaka, Japan\u201414 hours ahead of Chicago\u2014and on his way to a roughly hour-long meeting with China\u2019s President\u00a0Xi Jinping<\/strong>\u00a0as part of the G20 summit. On Saturday in Osaka, after the market had closed in Chicago, Trump emerged from his meeting with Xi and\u00a0announced<\/a>\u00a0that the intermittent trade talks were \u201cback on track.\u201d The following week was a good one in the stock market, thanks to the Trump announcement. On Thursday, June 27, the S&P 500 index stood at about 2915; a week or so later, it was just below 3000, a gain of 84 points, or $4,200 per e-mini contract. Whoever bought the 420,000 e-minis on June 28 had made a handsome profit of nearly $1.8\u00a0billion.<\/em><\/p>\n Traders in the Chicago pits have been watching these kinds of wagers with an increasing mixture of shock and awe since the start of the Trump presidency. They are used to rapid fluctuations in the S&P 500 index; volatility is common, of course. But the precision and timing of these trades, and the vast amount of money being made as a result of them, make the traders wonder if all this is on the level. Are the people behind these trades incredibly lucky, or do they have access to information that other people don\u2019t have about, say, Trump\u2019s or Beijing\u2019s latest thinking on the trade war or any other of a number of ways that Trump is able to move the markets through his tweeting or slips of the tongue? Essentially, do they have inside information?<\/p>\n Theoretically, market regulators are supposed to be keeping an eye on big trades such as these, to try to figure out whether they are just happy coincidences or whether there is something more nefarious afoot. And they say they do. But calls to the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, where the trades takes place, the Securities and Exchange Commission, which regulates the equity markets, and to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which regulates futures contracts, such as e-minis, were answered in different ways.\u00a0Christopher Carofine,<\/strong>\u00a0at the SEC, declined to comment. The CFTC did not respond to my inquiries, while a spokeswoman for the CME says the trades in question did not originate from a single source and they were of no concern.<\/p>\n There is no way for another trader, let alone an outsider such as me, to know who is making these trades. But regulators know or can find out. One longtime CME trader who has been watching with disgust says he\u2019s never seen anything quite like these trades, not at least since al-Qaida cashed in before initiating the September 11 attacks. \u201cThere is definite hanky-panky going on, to the world\u2019s financial markets\u2019 detriment,\u201d he says. \u201cThis is abysmal.\u201d<\/p>\n In the case of Trump, market manipulation also yields political dividends. Perhaps the most obvious example dates to late August, when Trump, desperate to reignite trade talks with China, boasted during the G7 summit that his counterparts in Beijing had come back to the table. \u201cWe\u2019ve gotten two calls\u2014very, very good calls,\u201d he\u00a0told<\/a>\u00a0reporters. \u201cThey mean business.\u201d The market rose more than 900 points over the next few days. But a spokesperson for the Chinese foreign ministry said he was not aware of any such calls. An editor at the\u00a0Global Times,<\/em>\u00a0the state-controlled newspaper,\u00a0tweeted<\/a>\u00a0that he knew of no calls made in the days leading up to the G7 meeting and that \u201cChina won\u2019t cave to US pressure.\u201d Two U.S government officials later\u00a0told CNN<\/a>\u00a0that Trump misspoke and \u201cconflated\u201d comments from China\u2019s Vice Premier\u00a0Liu He<\/strong>\u00a0with direct communication from the Chinese. According to CNN, the officials said Trump was \u201ceager to project optimism that might boost markets.\u201d<\/p>\n Indeed, this single Trump lie briefly inflated domestic markets by hundreds of billions of dollars. \u201cWhat this describes is, quite literally, market manipulation that constitutes criminal violations of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934,\u201d\u00a0commented<\/a>\u00a0George Conway,<\/strong>\u00a0the conservative attorney and Trump critic.<\/p>\n Whether Conway is right or wrong is a matter of legal opinion, but given how fishy and coincidental the trading in e-minis seems to be these days, the SEC or CFTC would be doing a great service (and their job) for the American people by investigating who is behind these lucrative trades, and what they knew before they placed them. At the moment, what we\u2019re getting from them is an indifferent shrug.<\/p>\n Federal regulators might start here: In the last 10 minutes of trading on Friday, August 23, as the markets were roiling in the face of more bad trade news, someone bought 386,000 September e-minis. Three days later, Trump\u00a0lied<\/a>\u00a0about getting a call from China to restart the trade talks, and the S&P 500 index shot up nearly 80 points. The potential profit on the trade was more than $1.5 billion.<\/p>\n