> We created bots to trade against incoming orders. They were like my friends. I even named them! My favorite was the “Jesse Livermore” bot. Opportunistic to a fault.
> The bots would run every day and place orders against each other so the market looked like it was exhibiting lots of price movement and volume. For added credibility, we randomly generated trading histories for each company going all the way back to last year. So we had historical price and volume in addition to streaming quotes for chart data.
and by then letting people speculatively place their own money into the already unbalanced and illegal equation, you somehow managed to wipe your hands of any responsibility for their actions?
What in god's name are you smoking? You got off easy with a 20k fine. You belong in prison.