JPMorgan’s gold trading and sales team was so focused on making money that they scammed the market for years with so-called spoofing trades, according to a former colleague who testified at the trial of three former bank employees charged with fraud.manipulate prices for all sorts
Edmonds described how he learned to spoof at JPMorgan. If he wanted to sell at a higher price, he’d put orders in above the current market price, and then place huge orders to buy at higher prices that he’d cancel before they could be executed. “I wanted to drive the price where I wanted it to go” by creating a false indication of demand, he said.
Traders on Nowak’s desk engaged in spoofing as a core business practice, doing it more than 50,000 times over nearly a decade, prosecutors allege, though the jury will only hear about a tiny portion of those. Edmonds said he never reported anyone for violating the bank’s compliance policy on trading. When asked why not, he told the jury: “I would have been fired. This was my dream job.”