Gold and Sex
A firm on Wall Street is scamming the market.
Circulating on the Internet is the program developer’s version of the story. This large Wall Street institution has for the past 10 years been tapping into the SEC servers, buying all the shares available for sale on the NYSE, and then selling them on to buyers who are offering to buy, at a rounded up price. The process happens in microseconds, and the Gold and Sex intervention remains secret from both buyer and the seller, since their servers are co-located with those of the NYSE 30 miles out of town, and the extra transactions are completed before the screens downtown can react.
Gold and Sex reaps ~1% of the NYSE turnover from this little fraud. Since the turnover is ~175bn USD per day, the profit for Gold and Sex is over 40bn USD every year!
Several federal inquiries have been started, but so far no one has had the political clout to overcome the hordes of senators and representatives paid off with Gold and Sex.