Navinder Sarao, a self-taught trader from Hounslow, made $50 million by spoofing: placing massive orders he never intended to fill to manipulate prices. He built custom software in his bedroom and mimicked tactics used openly by large institutions. The CFTC caught him during the 2010 Flash Crash, but many big banks who did the same faced no charges.
The guy from Hanslow who made $50 million out of what we're going to learn today, the trader, the legend, Navinder Sarawan. The cool thing about him, why he's such a legendary trader, is because he literally beat the institutions and the big traders that actually manipulate price and manipulates order flow. And he read these things in the order book that we're going to learn about now. And he said, wait, they are blatantly manipulating the markets. Let me do the same. And when the CFTC went into the case of the 2010 flash crash and analyzed the book during the flash crash, they saw this huge trader that was placing thousands and thousands of orders in the book and never getting filled, which is spoofing, right? And they thought it was a financial cartel. The sheer size of this guy was so big that they could have never imagined it was a guy from Hounslow in his childhood bedroom with a software that he has built based on his understanding of order flow. Got convicted, but the big banks and the big institutions and a lot of big market manipulators end up getting away with it.
