Lessons from Jane Street

While Sebi has done well, it needs to up its game to deal with the complexity of modern F&O trading

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PEAKING AT THE Financial Express CFO Awards a couple of weeks ago, Securities and Exchange Board of India (Sebi) chairman Tuhin Kanta Pandey said the regulator would come down very hard on market manipulators. He repeated the message once again on Saturday. That the regulator is firm on walking the talk was evident a day earlier when it barred US-based quant trading firm Jane Street and four affiliates from accessing Indian markets and ordered the impounding of ₹4,840 crore in alleged unlawful gains. The regulator's 105-page interim order accused the firm of engineering expiry-day moves in Nifty and Bank Nifty indices to mislead traders and profit from options positions. The order details how Jane Street aggressively bought select index stocks in the morning to push the index up, and then reversed those trades while holding bearish options positions that gained as the index fell.