Citadel Securities paid a $115,000 fine for these 502,243 violations and walked away. Pretty crazy over 500,000 violations against retail traders and they are still in business. <br /> <br /> The New York Stock Exchange charged Citadel Securities LLC with engaging in wash sales 502,243 times using its computer algorithms. A wash sale is where the buyer and the seller are the same entity and no change in beneficial ownership occurs. (Wash sales are illegal because they can manipulate stock prices up or down.) Citadel Securities paid a $115,000 fine for these 502,243 violations and walked away. That’s less than 23 cents per trade. <br /> The SEC settled a case against Citadel Securities for $22.6 million in fines and disgorgements, alleging the following had occurred: <br /> <br /> “…two algorithms used by Citadel Securities did not internalize retail orders at the best price observed nor sought to obtain the best price in the marketplace. These algorithms were triggered when they identified differences in the best prices on market feeds, comparing the SIP feeds to the direct feeds from exchanges. One strategy, known as FastFill, immediately internalized an order at a price that was not the best price for the order that Citadel Securities observed. The other strategy, known as SmartProvide, routed an order to the market that was not priced to obtain immediately the best price that Citadel Securities observed.” <br /> <br /> More recently, Citadel Securities agreed to a $700,000 fine by Wall Street’s self-regulator, FINRA, for executing customer orders at prices worse than it traded for its own account. Citadel Securities was allowed to neither admit nor deny the charges. The activities occurred over a period of years. <br /> <br /> FINRA fined Citadel Securities $180,000 for failing to mark 6.5 million equity trades as short sales. Citadel did not admit or deny the allegations but paid the fine. <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
