Bank of America Corp’s corporate and investment banking division agreed to pay US$42 million to settle a New York state probe into a masking scheme in which it misled clients about who was seeing and filling their orders, and who was trading in its dark pool.
Bank of America Merrill Lynch for years, starting in 2008, had trading agreements with electronic liquidity providers, such as Citadel Securities, Knight Capital and Madoff Securities that were hidden from customers, New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman said in a statement on Friday.
The bank’s behavior made its electronic trading services appear safer and more sophisticated than they really were, he said.
The bank “systematically concealed from its clients over a five-year period that it was secretly routing its clients’ orders for equity securities to such firms for execution,” Schneiderman said.
It used the masking strategy for more than 16 million client orders between 2008 and 2013, representing more than 4 billion traded shares, Schneiderman said.
The bank began addressing what it describes as a communications issue with its institutional clients in 2013, Bank of America spokesman Bill Halldin said in a statement.
“The settlement primarily relates to conduct that occurred as long as 10 years ago,” he said. “At all times we met our obligation to deliver the best prices to clients.”
Regulators have been taking a closer look at how brokers make decisions about where to send client orders, with dark pool private trading platforms coming under greater scrutiny in particular. The EU has been clamping down too, banning hundreds of stocks from trading on dark pools just this month in a drive for greater transparency.
Under Friday’s deal, Bank of America Merrill Lynch admitted that it inflated claims about the amount of retail orders routed to and executed in its dark pool, called “Instinct X,” the statement said.
The bank’s marketing material also boasted about its “strategic” and “tactical” trading algorithms used to route client orders on an “order by order” basis, when in reality it did not use such analysis, Schneiderman said.
Vincent Wei led fellow Singaporean farmers around an empty Malaysian plot, laying out plans for a greenhouse and rows of leafy vegetables. What he pitched was not just space for crops, but a lifeline for growers struggling to make ends meet in a city-state with high prices and little vacant land. The future agriculture hub is part of a joint special economic zone launched last year by the two neighbors, expected to cost US$123 million and produce 10,000 tonnes of fresh produce annually. It is attracting Singaporean farmers with promises of cheaper land, labor and energy just over the border.
US actor Matthew McConaughey has filed recordings of his image and voice with US patent authorities to protect them from unauthorized usage by artificial intelligence (AI) platforms, a representative said earlier this week. Several video clips and audio recordings were registered by the commercial arm of the Just Keep Livin’ Foundation, a non-profit created by the Oscar-winning actor and his wife, Camila, according to the US Patent and Trademark Office database. Many artists are increasingly concerned about the uncontrolled use of their image via generative AI since the rollout of ChatGPT and other AI-powered tools. Several US states have adopted
A proposed billionaires’ tax in California has ignited a political uproar in Silicon Valley, with tech titans threatening to leave the state while California Governor Gavin Newsom of the Democratic Party maneuvers to defeat a levy that he fears would lead to an exodus of wealth. A technology mecca, California has more billionaires than any other US state — a few hundred, by some estimates. About half its personal income tax revenue, a financial backbone in the nearly US$350 billion budget, comes from the top 1 percent of earners. A large healthcare union is attempting to place a proposal before
KEEPING UP: The acquisition of a cleanroom in Taiwan would enable Micron to increase production in a market where demand continues to outpace supply, a Micron official said Micron Technology Inc has signed a letter of intent to buy a fabrication site in Taiwan from Powerchip Semiconductor Manufacturing Corp (力積電) for US$1.8 billion to expand its production of memory chips. Micron would take control of the P5 site in Miaoli County’s Tongluo Township (銅鑼) and plans to ramp up DRAM production in phases after the transaction closes in the second quarter, the company said in a statement on Saturday. The acquisition includes an existing 12 inch fab cleanroom of 27,871m2 and would further position Micron to address growing global demand for memory solutions, the company said. Micron expects the transaction to
RSS