SEC Charges Investment Adviser and Owner with Cherry-Picking Profitable Trades 🍒

SEC Charges Connecticut Advisory Firm GlennCap and its Owner with Cherry-Picking

The Securities and Exchange Commission today announced settled fraud charges against GlennCap LLC, a Connecticut-based investment advisory firm, and its owner, Jonathan Vincent Glenn, for allocating profitable securities trades to favored accounts, including GlennCap’s own accounts and client accounts that paid GlennCap a higher percentage of positive returns in fees, while allocating a disproportionate amount of unprofitable trades to disfavored clients, a practice known as cherry-picking.

According to the SEC’s order, between at least January 2020 and March 2022, Glenn, who was also an investment adviser representative of GlennCap, engaged in block trading, which allowed him to pool funds from multiple clients’ accounts into trades, and then, after seeing whether a position increased or decreased in value, he allocated the more profitable trades to accounts that he favored. The probability that the favored accounts received the more profitable trades by chance was statistically nearly zero. The SEC’s order finds that Glenn and GlennCap received at least $2.7 million in profits from the cherry-picking scheme. Further, the SEC order found that Glenn made false and misleading statements regarding GlennCap’s trading practices in documents it provided to clients and prospective clients.

Binance.US Legal, Risk Executives Leave the Crypto Exchange

Key risk and legal executives are leaving Binance.US at the same time the crypto exchange is under intense pressure from regulators.

Krishna Juvvadi, head of legal, and Sidney Majalya, chief risk officer, are leaving the company, according to people familiar with the departures. The departures follow the departure earlier this week of CEO Brian Shroder.

Binance.US Not Playing Ball With Probe Into Changpeng Zhao’s Empire, SEC Says, As Focus Turns to Custody Arm Ceffu

Binance.US has been accused of not cooperating in a probe by the Securities and Exchange Commission, which has said the company’s staking, clearing and brokerage services violate federal securities law, in court filings unsealed Thursday.

Federal U.S. regulators worry the crypto exchange’s use of Ceffu, a custody service offered by Binance’s international arm, violates a previous deal intended to stop assets being squirreled overseas.

Binance.US’ holding company, known as BAM, has provided “only approximately 220 documents … many that consist of unintelligible screenshots and documents without dates or signatures,” the SEC said, of the process of evidence-gathering known as discovery.

Apple video on climate change featuring Octavia Spencer is slammed

A short film by Apple that cast Oscar-winner Octavia Spencer as Mother Nature in which she scolds CEO Tim Cook was met with scorn and derision for “greenwashing” the tech giant’s carbon footprint.

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“Let’s cut to the chase,” she tells Cook. “In 2020, you promised to bring Apple’s entire carbon footprint to zero by 2030.”

“Henry David Thoreau over here said, ‘We have a profound opportunity to build a more sustainable future for the planet we share,’” Mother Nature adds, quoting Cook, who gave a befuddled look after her reference to the famed naturalist and author of “Walden.”

The executives respond by running down a list of steps that the tech giant has taken toward carbon neutrality, including eliminating plastic from its packaging and operating on clean energy.

Top crypto state regulator to step down, headed to private sector

One of crypto’s top state regulators is leaving his post by the end of the month, FOX Business has learned.

Peter Marton, deputy superintendent of virtual currency at the New York State Department of Financial Services, will step down from his job effective Sept. 29, according to an internal memo seen by FOX Business.

The memo and Marton’s departure haven’t been publicly reported. In it, the department’s superintendent, Adrienne Harris, said Marton will pursue opportunities in the private sector.

Ex-Celsius crypto lender exec Cohen-Pavon pleads guilty, will cooperate with US probe

Roni Cohen-Pavon, a former executive at Alex Mashinsky’s now-bankrupt cryptocurrency lender Celsius Network, has pleaded guilty to U.S. criminal charges and agreed to cooperate with prosecutors’ investigations.

Cohen-Pavon, Celsius’ former chief revenue officer, admitted to four charges, including manipulating the price of the exchange’s crypto token Cel, at a Wednesday hearing before U.S. District Judge John Koeltl in Manhattan, court records showed on Thursday.

SEC Panel Set to Push Workforce Diversity Reporting Requirements

The SEC should require more workforce disclosures from companies to include employee diversity reporting, the agency’s advisory group for investor matters is preparing to recommend.

The Securities and Exchange Commission should direct companies to report data that may include workers’ gender, race, age, disabilities, and other characteristics important to investors, the agency’s Investor Advisory Committee said in a draft recommendation released Thursday. The panel’s input comes as the SEC is working to release a workforce disclosure proposal as early as October.

Ex-Deutsche Bank Banker Poised to Plead Guilty to Crypto Fraud

Former Deutsche Bank investment banker Rashawn Russell, who has denied defrauding investors in a cryptocurrency fraud, appears ready to change his mind and plead guilty to fraud charges, court records show.

Russell was indicted in April by federal prosecutors in Brooklyn, New York, accused of duping investors by promising them “guaranteed returns.”

‘One of the Most Hated People in the World’: Sam Bankman-Fried’s 250 Pages of Justifications

At the end of a 15,000-word Twitter thread he never posted, Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder of the failed cryptocurrency exchange FTX, offered a blunt assessment of his predicament.

“I’m broke and wearing an ankle monitor and one of the most hated people in the world,” he wrote. “There will probably never be anything I can do to make my lifetime impact net positive.”

He added: “And the truth is that I did what I thought was right.”

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In a draft of his unsent posts, which he formatted as a series of tweets spanning roughly 70 typed pages, he criticized some of his closest colleagues, interspersing his arguments with photos from his high school years and stock images of popcorn and a garden maze. Every few pages, a key moment in the narrative is accompanied with a link to a music video by Alicia Keys, Katy Perry or Rihanna.