Track Data Corporation today announced that it has added Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities LLC as another direct routing destination for stock trades placed through myTrack, its Internet-based online trading and market data service.
"You know, there’s a simple trick to getting the best executions for your trades," said Barry Hertz, Track Data Chairman and CEO. "You route your trade directly to the place offering you the best price. It’s pretty simple, and yet most investors still let their brokerage firm make all the routing decisions for them, never checking to see if they’re really getting the best possible execution, never checking to see if their trades are always getting routed to the same place over and over…
Madoff makes markets. Founded in 1960, Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities is a market maker in US stocks, including all of the S&P 500 and more than 350 Nasdaq stocks, as well as bonds and other financial instruments. It is also a member of the London Stock Exchange. The firm moves large blocks of stock for institutional clients by splitting up orders or arranging off-exchange transactions between parties. It also performs clearing and settlement services. Clients include brokerages, banks, and other financial institutions. In addition, Madoff Securities manages assets for high-net-worth individuals, hedge funds, and other institutional investors.
 22. At that time, Madoff informed the senior employees that he had recently made profits through business operations, and that now was a good time to distribute it. When the senior employee challenged his explanation, Madoff said that he did not want to talk to them at the office, and arranged a meeting at Madoff s apartment in Manhattan. At that meeting Madoff stated, in substance, that he "wasn’t sure he would be able to hold it together" if they continued to discuss the issue at the office."
23.- At Madoff s Manhattan apartment, Madoff informed the two senior employees, in substance, that his investment advisory business was a fraud. Madoff stated that he was "finished," that he had "absolutely nothing," that "it’s all just one big lie," and that it was "basically, a giant Ponzi scheme." In substance, Madoff communicated to the senior employees that he had for years been paying returns to certain investors out of the principal received from other, different, investors. Madoff stated that the business was insolvent, and that it had been for years. Madoff also stated that he estimated the losses from this fraud to be approximately $50 billion. One of the senior employees has a personal account at BMIS in which several million had been invested under the management of Madoff.
24. At Madoff’s Manhattan apartment, Madoff further informed the two senior employees referenced above that, in approximately one week, he planned to surrender to authorities, but before he did that, he had approximately $200-300 million left, and he planned to use that money to make payments to certain selected employees, family, and friends…
|
"You know, there’s a simple trick to getting the best executions for your trades. You route your trade directly to the place offering you the best price. It’s pretty simple"…
You can always diagnose procrastination. And this is it. There’s something resembling work I need to be doing. But I woke up early, and thought I’d just peek at things people said about Bernard Madoff’s Company before last Wednesday when it bit the dust. There are so many articles about Madoff that it turned out to be a tougher Google than I thought, but they are there, though many of the glowing recommendations have been scrubbed already. Even some of the Google caches are scrubbed. But there are some still around. So, I’ll say a few things about my new Bernard Madoff Pre-Crash Endorsements Procrastination Hobby before getting to work on what the universe would prefer I do on this foggy rainy day in Georgia.
By his own account, Ponzi arrived in the United States in 1903 with two dollars and fifty cents in his pocket, having gambled away the rest of his life savings during the voyage…In 1907 Ponzi moved to Montreal, Canada, and became an assistant teller in the newly opened Banco Zarossi, a bank started by "Louis" Luigi Zarossi to service the influx of Italian immigrants arriving in the city. Zarossi paid 6% interest on bank deposits – double the going rate at the time – and was growing rapidly as a result. Ponzi found out that the bank was in serious financial trouble because of bad real estate loans, and that Zarossi was funding the interest payments not through profit on investments, but by using money deposited in newly opened accounts. The bank eventually failed and Zarossi fled to Mexico with a large portion of the bank’s money…
Eventually he walked into the offices of a former Zarossi customer and, finding no one there, wrote himself a check for $423.58 in a checkbook he found, forging the signature of a director of the company. Confronted by police who had taken note of his large expenditures just after the forged check was cashed, Ponzi held out his hands wrist up and said "I’m guilty." He ended up spending three years in a Quebec prison. Rather than inform his mother of this development, he posted her a letter stating that he had found a job as a "special assistant" to a prison warden…
Ponzi spent the last years of his life in poverty. He had a stroke in 1948, and died in a charity hospital in Rio de Janeiro on January 18, 1949. His life had been characterized by one great moment of glory surrounded by outlandish, wild ventures which inevitably led to his downfall. In the charity hospital, Ponzi granted one last interview to an American reporter, and commented about the wild ride he had given Bostonians: "Even if they never got anything for it, it was cheap at that price. Without malice aforethought I had given them the best show that was ever staged in their territory since the landing of the Pilgrims! It was easily worth fifteen million bucks to watch me put the thing over."
The original Ponzi was such an obvious sociopathic con-man, it’s tempting to try to find some deeper psychological explanation for Bernard Madoff – a rosebud like ending for the movie that explains his behavior. But there’s a lot to suggest that Bernard Madoff was nothing special, except being good at his trade as a con-artist. He offered Trading Services at rock bottom prices. When confronted about his odd way of doing business, he was cryptic, but in a way that suggested brilliance. While some of his investors suspected that his success was from something shady, like insider trading, they did not suspect a Ponzi scheme. In fact, it’s his remarkable survival in spite of any number of obvious warning signs and audits that assures us that this was conscious, premeditated fraud from the outset, not someone whose legitimate business was on hard times and he’d lost his shirt trying to recover. Had it not been for a particularly big "run on the Bank" because of the current financial crisis, Bernard Madoff might be in Palm Beach today getting ready for a black tie holiday gala at the Country Club.
Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.