SEC Alleges Affinity Fraud and Ponzi Scheme Targeting North Texas Ismaili Community

SEC Charges Man with Perpetrating an Affinity Fraud and Ponzi Scheme in the North Texas Ismaili Community

The Securities and Exchange Commission announced today that it filed charges against Arsalan A. Rawjani and the business enterprise he operated, Trade with Ayasa, LLC, which operated through various corporate forms, for allegedly conducing an affinity fraud and Ponzi scheme centered in the North Texas Ismaili community, where Rawjani was an active member and community leader. The SEC’s complaint alleges that, between 2021 and 2024, Rawjani held himself out in his community as an expert in options trading and solicited investments for his company by falsely promising that the investors’ money would be pooled for trading options contracts and that investors would be paid a guaranteed monthly dividend, typically three to five percent, from Trade with Ayasa’s options trading profits.

According to the complaint, however, only a small fraction of the investors’ money was ever invested in the options market and trading profits were insufficient to pay the guaranteed dividends; most of the money was instead either misappropriated for Rawjani’s personal gain or misused for, among other things, Ponzi payments necessary to keep the scheme afloat. The complaint alleges that Rawjani’s lackluster trading and inability to attract new investors caused the scheme to collapse in late 2023 and early 2024; at that time, Rawjani stopped paying monthly dividends to investors and left investors with millions of dollars in losses.

Bill Ackman Has a Trade for Eric Adams

If you were a candidate in a US election, and you decided that you would rather have $1 million than win your election, could you find a way to get paid $1 million for dropping out? Let’s assume that going to your opponent’s richest backer and saying “please give me $1 million to drop out” would be frowned upon. But in 2025 there are prediction markets, and if your election is high-profile enough, then there might be a trade here. The trade is:

1. If you are trading at, say, a 40% probability of winning, sell 2.5 million contracts on yourself for $1 million (40 cents each).

2. Announce you’re dropping out.

3. Your contract resolves to zero (you won’t win) and you keep the $1 million.

WH Smith’s ‘Basic’ Accounting Error Puts Auditor in the Hot Seat

An investigation untangling the accounting errors that led UK retailer WH Smith to vastly overstate its projected annual profit also puts a spotlight on its auditor, PwC.

Shares in WH Smith Plc crashed by more than 40% after it more than halved profit forecasts for its North America stores to around £25 million ($34 million) from £55 million for the year that ended Aug. 31. Revenue from suppliers was accounted for “in earlier periods than it should have been,” the company said in an emailed statement explaining the mistake….

Financial Bubbles Happen Less Often Than You Think

In my research on more than a century of global stock-market returns, I looked for how often bubbles occur. I defined them as a rapid doubling of stock prices followed by a crash that gave back all or more of the gains over the next one year or the next five years. Looking at all of those possible five-year periods, bubbles only happened in less than one-half of 1% of them. […]

There have been a few seemingly catastrophic days when the market dropped precipitously. But not as many as you might think. Since 1887, there have been just four cases where the Dow Jones Industrial Average has dropped by more than 10% in a single day—and two of those were during the big crash of 1929. […]

And, in fact, researchers found that since 1900, a long-term U.S. investor who stuck with a diversified stock portfolio in global markets earned returns of about 9.5% a year—despite the crash of 1929, the Great Depression, the single-day loss of more than 20% on the S&P in 1987, the bursting of the dot-com bubble or the Covid meltdown.