Are you at all willing to have an honest conversation without resorting to hyperbole or illogical conclusions from sparse facts?
You have not made a very good impression regardless of your outrage over your buddies getting paid for trades. You went to work for the same enterprise. You admitted you lost $10m. That alone is astounding and a complete failure of any responsible approach to money management. If some of that was client funds, you especially needed to cut the losses. You still refuse to say whether you EARNED the $10m yourself or managed to acquire it through other means. Either way, it was irresponsible to continue losing funds when you clearly didn't cut it as a trader.
Regardless, if you want to have AP member contribute to this discussion, you'll have to limit your delusions to the specific facts without generalizing from them. So far, you show no ability to have perspective.
Bear and Pluvia have been pretty straightforward about their perspective. I have had my differences with each of them, but they speak the truth about most of these issues from my perspective.
Mostly, I am appalled with the way this trial was conducted and think all of us ought to think about what it means about our individual rights. Regardless of what you think of Tony or what your experiences were with his calls, he usually had the TRUTH behind him regarding the firms involved. As far as I know, no one has disputed the call; only the source. Yet I don't see the same outrage when scammers milk $10m from pump and dumps and get nailed to the extent they have to give back part or all of the gains and promise not to do it again.
Tony was either a fool or ignorant or unethical when he allowed an FBI agent to feed him information. I'm not sure I'd know that was horribly wrong since I'd respect the agent's authority to pass out the information. Fortunately, I never had to make that decision personally since I never had any knowledge directly that some call was related to an FBI database search. In fact, as I've stated in the past, the announcement that the FBI was on the site had exactly the opposite effect on the group... they stopped joking about bad moves (even though they never did them in the first place) and gave some respect to the fact they needed to behave properly.
Breen's assault on Tony's use of Royer's searches is a legitimate complaint; but was Tony the instigator? I don't think so. Was the private site set up for the purpose of fraud? I don't think so. Did Hansen know at the time that erasing the logs was a felony? I don't think so. Was Tony stupid for announcing information so sensitive that he had to ask for the logs to be erased? Yes. Did he ask people not to trade on it? Yes.
So, from my perspective, I think Tony's personality and bipolar disease kept him on the edge of legitimacy. He consistently chose bad friends. Do I think he set out to break the law? Absolutely not. Did Royer lead him into doing so? Apparently so. Did he frontrun? I had no clue, but apparently that IS illegal and if he did so, he's guilty.
But the bottom line for me is that facing years in prison for being sucked in by an FBI agent into trading on FBI info is too much a price to pay for someone who has done so much good. Throw the book at the FBI guy who should have known better. But cut Tony some slack.
Just my opinion. |
