Foreign Collusion, Naked Shorting (Counterfeiting) & Money Laundering — All Illicit Wealth
Affirm’s Max Levchin Responds to New Competition From Apple
Bloomberg, 17 July 2021
Affirm CEO Max Levchin discusses Apple’s announcement that they will collaborate with Goldman Sachs and start allowing customers to buy products using Apple Pay and pay off the purchases in installments, which will be in direct competition with his company. He speaks with Emily Chang on “Bloomberg Technology.”
How to conquer synthetic identity fraud
Carey O’Connor Kolaja, 29 June 2021
“No single organization can stop synthetic identity fraud on its own,” reports The Federal Reserve. “Fraudster tactics continually evolve to stay a step ahead of detection—and the most sophisticated fraudsters can operate at scale in organized crime rings, generating significant losses for the payments industry. It is imperative that payments industry stakeholders work together, share information and keep up with the threat.”
Synthetic fraud is today’s fastest-growing type of financial crime. To make matters worse, up to 95% goes undetected by regular fraud models, as these actors behave, act and look like regular customers that neither the human eye nor highly complex computer vision methods would have detected. Continue reading “Article: How to conquer synthetic identity fraud”
Wall Street languid as “meme stock” frenzy hogs spotlight
Stephen Culp, 08 June 2021
Wall Street stocks wavered near the starting line on Tuesday as a lack of clear market catalysts kept institutional investors on the sidelines, while retail traders kept the rally of so-called meme stocks alive. All three major U.S. stock indexes were little changed, with the S&P (.SPX) and the Dow (.DJI) hovering within 1% of their record closing highs.
The tech-laded Nasdaq (.IXIC) fared best, with Amazon.com Inc (AMZN.O) and Apple Inc (AAPL.O) providing the biggest boost. The CBOE volatility index (.VIX), a measure of investor anxiety, touched its lowest level in over a year. Continue reading “Article: Wall Street languid as “meme stock” frenzy hogs spotlight”
Stocks Pop in After-Hours as Traders Eye Oil and Inflation
Gerelyn Terzo, 07 June 2021
Stocks finished mixed on Monday with the S&P 500 failing to make a run for a new record and closing slightly in the red. The index is already up about 12% year-to-date, but investors are feeling a bit skittish about inflation.
The Nasdaq and the Dow Jones Industrial Average both finished the day up fractionally, while oil is back on investors’ radar to reclaim the USD 100 level in the medium-term. Meme stocks continue to rule the roost. Let’s take a look at some of today’s market action. Continue reading “Article: Stocks Pop in After-Hours as Traders Eye Oil and Inflation”
Feedzai’s Financial Crime Report: Fraud rises by 159% Year on Year
Feedzai Inc, 02 June 2021
SAN MATEO, Calif. and LONDON, June 02, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Feedzai, the world’s leading cloud-based financial crime management platform, has announced its Quarterly Financial Crime Report , an analysis of over 12 billion global banking transactions from January – March 2021. The report identifies trends in spending and in fraud attempts to show that this past quarter, as consumer activities increased, fraudsters attempted to hide their fraudulent transactions in legitimate banking. In fact, combining all banking fraud – internet, telephone, and branch – attacks grew a whopping 159% in Q1 2021 compared to Q4 2020.
Online banking made up 96% of all banking transactions and it accounted for 93% of all fraud attempts in Q1 2021. This leaves in-branch and telephone banking to make up the remaining 4%. And while the numbers are smaller, in-branch banking did increase by 442% this quarter compared with the last as a result of eased lockdown restrictions as businesses begin to open for trade. In addition, telephone scammers upped their efforts and the report shows a 728% increase in telephone banking fraud. Continue reading “Article: Feedzai’s Financial Crime Report: Fraud rises by 159% Year on Year”
The Market Is Ripe For Another GameStop Saga
Michael Kern , 31 May 2021
About three months ago, the investing world was left reeling after retail investors proved they can beat Wall Street at its own game.
Reddit group “r/Wallstreetbets” (aka WSB)–a longstanding subreddit channel created nearly a decade ago where more than 4 million Reddit users discuss highly speculative trading strategies and ideas–engaged in a crowdsourced pump-and-dump scheme that created massive volatility in the stock markets by buying heavily shorted stocks such as GameStop Inc. (NYSE:GME), AMC Entertainment Holdings (NYSE:AMC), and BlackBerry Inc. (NYSE:BB), among others. The massive buying wave created large short squeezes as hedge funds betting against these stocks rushed to cover their positions and cut losses after GME skyrocketed an unfathomable 1,500% in the space of a few days; AMC saw its share price triple while BB jumped 460% before they came crashing to the ground after popular zero-fee trading app Robinhood blocked trading activity. Continue reading “Article: The Market Is Ripe For Another GameStop Saga”
The Swiss National Bank’s US Stocks: $150 Billion And Counting – OpEd
MISES, 15 May 2021
This time last year, the Swiss National Bank (SNB) had US stock holdings of $94 billion. The portfolio of Switzerland’s central bank has grown by $56 billion since, reporting ownership of $150 billion worth of US listed stocks as at Q1 2021.
Apple is currently the largest holding, at $8 billion, but the portfolio contains countless smaller publicly traded companies, like GameStop, valued at $25 million at quarter end this year. Continue reading “Article: The Swiss National Bank’s US Stocks: $150 Billion And Counting – OpEd”
Share buybacks roar back – but how good an idea are they?
Adrian Holliday, 13 May 2021
Spurred by the speed of global vaccination roll-outs, stimulus boosts and a white-hot US first-quarter earnings period, some US companies have upped dividend payments to their shareholders. Alternatively, they’re buying back their own shares in ‘buybacks’. So what are share buybacks? Is the UK seeing a similar wave – and how good an idea are share buybacks for investors? Continue reading “Article: Share buybacks roar back – but how good an idea are they?”
Apple Gets New Damages Trial After $506M Patent Verdict
Caitlin Simpson, 14 April 2021
A Texas federal judge ruled Wednesday that Apple is entitled to a new damages trial after a jury found in August that it infringed PanOptis’ standard-essential 4G wireless patents and must pay $506 million, saying there is “serious doubt” about the reliability of the verdict.
U.S. District Judge Rodney Gilstrap declined to order a new trial on any other issues that Apple raised. As for the damages, he said that because the dispute centers on standard-essential patents, or SEPs, they must be licensed on terms that are fair, reasonable and nondiscriminatory, or FRAND, but the parties decided to leave the FRAND issues to a bench trial after the jury trial. Continue reading “Article: Apple Gets New Damages Trial After $506M Patent Verdict”
SEC is investigating Japanese investment giant SoftBank for market manipulation
DUNCAN RILEY, 25 March 2021
The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission is investigating Japanese telecommunications company and investment giant SoftBank Group Corp. for alleged market manipulation.
Founded in 1981, SoftBank holds a significant share — 21.2% as of 2020 of Japan’s mobile phone subscription market — but is best known in the W est for its prolific investment portfolio. The list of companies SoftBank has invested in is too long to list but notable names include Uber Technologies Inc., Didi Chuxing Co. Ltd., Grab Holdings Inc., Nvidia Corp., TikTok owner ByteDance Ltd. and DoorDash Inc.
Along with operating the world’s largest technology-focused venture capital fund, Softbank has a particular interest in ride-hailing companies. Except for Lyft Inc., SoftBank owns significant minority stakes in just about every other company in the market. When Grab purchased Uber’s Southeast Asian arm in 2018, it was a deal between two SoftBank-funded companies. Continue reading “Article: SEC is investigating Japanese investment giant SoftBank for market manipulation”
Continue reading “Hedge Funds are Getting Crushed by the Worst Short Squeeze in a Quarter Century”
WSJ | 21.02.01
Apple Bank for Savings will pay the FDIC $12.5 million for allegedly failing to comply with the Bank Secrecy Act
Apple Bank for Savings agreed to pay $12.5 million to settle a regulator’s claims that it failed to comply with anti-money-laundering rules. The bank allegedly violated the Bank Secrecy Act, an anti-money-laundering law, between April 2014 and September 2018, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation said. The order was issued in December and made public on Friday.
Continue reading “New York Bank Fined For Anti-Money-Laundering Law Failures”
Apple and Tesla distort S&P 500 performance, says Jim Cramer
Ben Lovejoy, 21 August 2020
CNBC Mad Money host Jim Cramer says that strong performance by Apple and Tesla has led to a misleading impression of the performance of S&P 500 stocks.
Cramer said that the S&P has grown more than 50% since its coronavirus low in March, but this is mostly due to the performance of tech giants, with Apple and Tesla particularly influential …
Continue reading “Article: Apple and Tesla distort S&P 500 performance, says Jim Cramer”
Peter Oppenheimer has been on the Board of Directors of Goldman Sachs since 2014. He previously retired from Apple, Inc. as Senior Vice President in 2014. He was also the Divisional Chief Financial Officer, Finance, MIS, Administration and Equipment Leasing Portfolio at Automatic Data Processing, Inc. (ADP), and a Consultant, Information Technology Practice at Coopers & Lybrand, LLP (1988-1992). Oppenheimer graduated from California Polytechnic State University and the Leavey School of Business, University of Santa Clara.
‘Pro-Crypto’ Peter Thiel Warns Bitcoin “Could Be A Chinese Financial Weapon Against The US”