Applying Germany's Market Manipulation Rules to Disruptive Trades on the Eurex and MTS Platforms

Abstract

Until recently, cheap fiction and corporate finance most famously met in the creative accounting of companies like WorldCom and Enron. Now, however, both the spoof James Bond, Austin Powers, and the securities regulators of Germany, the United Kingdom, Italy and France face common, twin malevolence:Doctor Evil and Mini Me.These reportedly were the names of a trading strategy devised at the London based European government bond desk of Citigroup Inc. to correct – as reported in theThe Wall Street Journal Europe– what a senior bank executive had referred to as their not “making enough money for the firm.” According to theJournal, “Citigroup wanted to use the futures market to push up prices for bonds traded on the cash market, which tend to follow futures prices. Then they would dump a large amount of bonds in the cash market, reaping profits from their holdings and forcing down prices, to the detriment of other market participants.” At 10:00 am on August 2, 2004, six Citigroup traders launched “Mini Mi” by building up positions in the Eurex futures market, then at 11:29 am they unleashed the “Dr. Evil” trading program, which placed sell orders for various European government bonds, with a total aggregate value of € 83 billion, of which only € 12.4 found buyers; once “the price of the bonds had fallen because of the flood of sell orders, Citigroup bought back € 3.8 billion in bonds … and is estimated to have made around € 15 million in profit.” The spot sales were primarily conducted on the MTS fixed-income trading platform, and constituted 42% of the platform's total value for the day; the traders had cash positions of only about € 8 billion in the securities for which they placed sell orders of up to € 83 billion, which could have left them with a much larger short position than the € 4.4 billion they eventually had.