Courtesy of Pam Martens.
Eric Hunsader of Nanex
Last Wednesday, Eric Hunsader, the outspoken executive from data feed company, Nanex, posted a letter at the company’s web site that the big Wall Street law firm, Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom LLP, had filed with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) last December.
The letter was co-signed by Mark D. Young and Jerrold E. Salzman and was addressed to Dan Berkovitz, General Counsel of the CFTC. Skadden demanded answers as to how Section 8 trading data had fallen into the hands of academics not directly employed by the CFTC. (The academics had the temerity to analyze the data as it related to potential market manipulation by high frequency traders and publish the findings for the public at large to scrutinize – a travesty if ever there was one in the eyes of Wall Street.)
As it turns out, Skadden lawyer Mark Young has been throwing his weight around the CFTC for years. A search at CFTC brings up 129 separate references to CFTC phone calls or meetings with Young or letters and comments he has made with the federal agency.
In an April 13, 2012 letter to the CFTC, Young wants the CFTC to skip requiring those small single family offices from having to register as commodity pool operators. Young says he represents 48 of these single family offices — who just happen to have bumped into each other somehow and formed a group called the Private Investor Coalition, Inc., which just happens to have enough money to buy the enormously expensive muscle of Skadden Arps.
A simple solution to the Section 8 trading data that Young wants to wall off from academics on the basis that it contains “trade secrets,” would be to simply remove the trading firm’s name from the data and substitute a number, such as, Trading Firm 1. Young doesn’t suggest that as a remedy.
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