Paychest Inc (PYCT)

[lloydm]

TRADING FIRM KNIGHT CAPITAL CHARGED WITH ABUSING “NAKED SHORTS”


The Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (Finra), a private self-regulatory organization, charged KCG on October 31 with thousands of violations over three years of Regulation SHO, which according to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) “was established to address concerns regarding persistent failures to deliver and potentially abusive ‘naked’ short selling.

Finra staff reviewed four separate time periods from 2012 to 2015, spot-checking for errors. Most of the problems were found between June and July 2013, when Finra found 3,477 separate instances of KCG engaging in “a short sale for its own account without first borrowing the security,” a description of naked short selling, “while it had a fail-to-deliver position… that had not been closed out.” According to a footnote, these naked shorts were done “to facilitate a customer(s) long sale order on a riskless principal basis.”

https://theintercept.com/2016/12/15/whistleblower-vindicated-massive-trading-firm-knight-capital-charged-with-abusing-naked-shorts/