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.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day