Jane Street barred from Indian markets as regulator freezes $566 million

Don't know about Jane Street, but that sounds like a general problem.

If options & futures are more liquid than the underlying, someone will be tempted to nudge the underlying.

Bond ETFs and their options chains seem like another locale where this could happen.

Maybe, but given the reputation of Indian regulators I’m skeptical Jane Street’s only sin was the alleged market manipulation.

People may recall the matter involving Adani Group. https://hindenburgresearch.com/adani-update-sebi/

Ok, but what moron was selling them the puts , and not seeing the pattern after a couple of days of this ? Sebi logic seems questionable.

So why can’t other players detect this behavior and trade with JS, removing their edge?

Hardly a sophisticated high tech HFT operation. Totally illegal of course, except in places that maybe don't have the regulatory rigeur.

>the regulators are either too lazy, stupid, ill equipped or uninterested to do anything about it.

Or it's their friends doing it and they're not uninterested, they're very interested in ensuring it continues.

SEBI’s bold move, at the expense of appearing unfriendly to foreign institutions, is commendable. I really hope that the SEC will wake up from its slumber and start investigating the tactics used by Citadel and its kind.

Who makes the markets in India? Is it the big Indian banks, or do these multinational trading firms act as market makers? If so, how do they distinguish between their trading and market making activities? It seems like it'd be relatively easy to rig a market (control the price) with enough capital and management over the trading.

>but many large-scale HFTs today operate in ways that either stretch the legal boundaries or exploit regulatory gaps. Many practices arguably amount to market manipulation in spirit, even if technically legal.

Can you expand on this?

That's sort of the very definition of arbitrage in today's modern markets - its not just the text book definition of "borrow money at a low interest rate and invest at a higher interest rate": there's latency arbs, regulatory arbs, microstructure arbs... They belong to the firms who can research and benefit from them before others figure it out.

Does it really matter? I've done nothing but buy and hold at reasonable prices, and market manipulation has never affected my trades. This seems like finance bros fucking finance bros, which is solidly in the "who cares" category of my life.

I'm amazed they managed to move firms. Suppose you know how the strategy works, and it's like what SEBI says.

1) How do you approach mlp? They don't just give you an account, they have risk officers, compliance officers, and general strategy due diligence.

2) If you manage to get past it, what then? Say mlp just asks some superficial questions and sees the dollar signs. Are you going to do the same thing? You have to think the compliance people will complain, surely?

3) So maybe the strategy they actually approached with was a parasitical strategy? If you know which stocks will be bought and sold by JS, maybe you do jump in first? Especially as you'll know particulars like when it happens, which stocks are selected, and how to spot them.

As always in finance the secret ingredient is crime.

I wonder to what degree the lawsuit is what got this on the radar of the Indian authorities. Maybe they should have listened to Stringer Bell.

This is interesting. Anyone know what they offered these traders? Can't be more than Zucks 100mn offer!

Tower got caught doing the same thing about 10 years ago. Apparently the strategy was literally called "the hammer" or something that was far too on-the-nose, but it was exploiting other strategies at the firm that bought a ton in the morning and hammered the close - "the hammer" made that leg profitable.

I assume Jane Street's version of this may have been unintentional: get your big position to do a bunch of intraday trading without worrying about being too short, then exit at the end of the day. This can work because markets tend to go up or stay flat intraday, meaning you get to use typical strategies in a jurisdiction that doesn't like when you go short via superposition. Then along the way, someone figured out this options trade and didn't realize their own behavior was influencing the price of the option (oops, I guess it wasn't superposition all along).

They probably run every sort of strategy available in various markets. The indian one they probably played a much riskier hand thinking they could get away with it.

Not really.

In this case it was Millenium ratting out on Jane Street (edit - other way around), but now the entire HFT (Edit: hedge funds. Thanks for the callout avvt4avaw) industry is under extreme scrutiny by SEBI as a result [0]

[0] - https://www.sebi.gov.in/enforcement/orders/jul-2025/interim-...

"market manipulation" in general is hard to define. The working definition in the US is something along the lines of "placing orders in the hopes that the price of the security will change in response to those orders existing, with no intention of actually executing the orders". There may be some specific regulations about specific types of market manipulation that are more clearly defined, but oftentimes not. There's lots of grey area, because the definition of market manipulation makes it seem like any order that's canceled instead of executed might be market manipulation. But in fact a majority of orders do get canceled before they trade!

So the real difference between market manipulation and a canceled order is just intention, so regulators have to make judgment calls sometimes.

Honestly, there's a good case to be made that it doesn't matter. A government has every right to say "don't manipulate our market and try to fuck our economy" and not need to specify every tiny little loophole, especially to foreign companies. The fact that they must be reactive means they are always behind, and guarantees their country will be screwed and untold damage done before the problem can be addressed.

There is absolutely zero illusion that Jane Street is acting in good faith. They know what they're doing is wrong.

After all the manipulation, all the crashes, all the exploitation - maybe it is appropriate to just say "I don't care if we wrote it down, we've had enough of this shit".

Take the example of spoofing. A trader puts in a 10mm order on the bid in futures, and then pulls it once price gets near him. He then develops an automated trading strategy that capitalizes on the volatility spike in the options market when this bid hits the tape.

This example has two common characteristics of market manipulation - using size to push markets in a direction for personal benefit, and putting the bid in with sole intent to push the market, as in there was never any desire to see the order actually get filled.

If Jane Street was selling options that were only profitable within the context of a strategy that involved pushing massive size into the market near market close and forcing price down, that is likely categorized as manipulation. On the other hand, if they were moving inventory and in the process moved price, and they tweak their trading strategies to further profit from this, that's a more arguable position.

> What is „market manipulation“ actually vs non-manipulative buying and selling to make a profit?

directly proportional to the distance from the courts/judges/regulators

market manipulation is when you place/cancel an order with the intention that the market will react to you in a specific way, with no intention of that order actually executing.

Selling naked puts doesn’t seem particularly outrageous. About half the time that I want to buy a position, I’ll sell a series of put options just OoM until I get assigned the shares I want, collecting small premium along the way.

My “hedge” in this case is that I want to own the shares. (I’m short vs where I want to be.)

NIT: It's _marking_ the close. "Painting" has a different meaning.

My understanding is that it is the closest to legal gambling available in India and so the local market for gambling type behavior inflates the Indian options volume.