Good morning @Gekkko! My reading of the substantial notice is similar to others in that CS are most likely not building an unhedged principal position, but rather borrowing stock from other people in order to lend it to their hedge fund clients. An alternative possibility is that they have been accumulating on behalf of a single corporate client and only just tipping over 5% due to stock borrow. Either way, it means I respectfully disagree with @jerryevansss’ analysis of this notice.
In terms of your other points, neither of them are relevant to this disclosure and if they have done wrong, they should be investigated and prosecuted. In a past life, I’ve had to deal with institutional size FX traders and they tend to be an interesting bunch, I could imagine those street performers doing the three card trick for money would make “good” fx traders, depending on what you mean by “good”. They also tended to socialise with each other, so I would not be surprised at all if some of them “coordinated” client orders - the revelations of sellside messaging chat rooms and the prosecutions coming from them was unsurprising to me as a customer. It will be interesting to see where the court draws the line between legitimate broking (ie, the customer wants their broker to “broke” - to find someone to take the other side of their trade, which necessitates talking to anyone including traders from other banks), and collusion, which also involves talking to traders from other banks.
GXY Price at posting:
87.5¢ Sentiment: None Disclosure: Not Held
