Report: Feds Investigating Meme Stock Frenzy For Market Manipulation
Sarah Hansen, 11 February 2021
Federal authorities are investigating whether massive gains in “meme stocks” like GameStop in January were caused by market manipulation or other illegal behavior, the Wall Street Journal reported Thursday.
In January, individual traders from online communities like Reddit’s r/WallStreetBets forum and users of popular online brokerage apps like Robinhood were a driving force behind the meteoric rise of a handful of previously unpopular stocks. The traders pitted themselves against major hedge funds who had bet that the price of stocks in struggling companies like GameStop, AMC Entertainment, and Blackberry would fall in a practice called short selling. The rapid surge of interest from retail investors pushed the price of those stocks to record levels, and hedge funds like Melvin Capital faced massive losses as a result. At the peak of the frenzy, Robinhood restricted trading on shares of GameStop and a handful of other stocks, prompting a swift backlash from lawmakers and multiple class-action lawsuits from traders who said they had missed out on gains.
Richard Choo-Beng Lee, who co-founded Spherix Capital and once was an analyst at SAC Capital, pled guilty in 2009 along with Spherix co-founder Ali Far, admitting to engaging in an insider trading scheme that enabled Spherix to make $5 million. Lee secretly informed on various individuals and recorded several phone calls with 28 people, including billionaire Steven A. Cohen, whose SAC Capital employed Lee as an analyst from 1999 to 2004, prosecutors said. Lee was also ordered by U.S. District Judge Kevin Castel in Manhattan to pay a $100,000 fine in light of his 2009 guilty plea.
Ali Far is a former employee at the Galleon Group. He left in 2008 to start his own Hedge fund (Spherix Capital Partners) with his Partner, Richard Choo-Beng Lee, aka “C.B.” Far was sentenced to one year of probation for his participation in multiple insider trading schemes during which he obtained, shared, and traded based on material, non-public information (“inside information”) stolen from several public companies. Far pled guilty in October 2009 to one count of conspiracy to commit securities fraud and one count of securities fraud pursuant to a cooperation agreement with the government. Together, he and his co-conspirator at Spherix gained approximately $5,209,464 for their hedge fund by placing trades in Spherix accounts based on Inside Information.
Brian J. Lee is the firm’s Chief Risk Officer of Goldman Sachs. He is a member of the Management Committee, Firmwide Risk Committee, Firmwide Asset Liability Committee, Firmwide Enterprise Risk Committee and Firmwide Investment Policy Committee. Previously, Mr. Lee was the firm’s Controller and Chief Accounting Officer from 2017 to 2019. He joined Goldman Sachs in 1994 and held numerous management roles within Controllers, including as Deputy Controller, before assuming his role as Controller and Chief Accounting Officer in 2017. Lee was named Managing Director in 2002 and Partner in 2008. Prior to joining the firm, he worked at Price Waterhouse from 1989 to 1994.
Allison Herren Lee is a Commissioner of the Securities and Exchange Commission 