Corruption and Fraud in Financial Markets: Malpractice, Misconduct and Manipulation

Identifying malpractice and misconduct should be top priority for financial risk managers today

Corruption and Fraud in Financial Markets identifies potential issues surrounding all types of fraud, misconduct, price/volume manipulation and other forms of malpractice. Chapters cover detection, prevention and regulation of corruption and fraud within different financial markets. Written by experts at the forefront of finance and risk management, this book details the many practices that bring potentially devastating consequences, including insider trading, bribery, false disclosure, frontrunning, options backdating, and improper execution or broker-agency relationships.

Informed but corrupt traders manipulate prices in dark pools run by investment banks, using anonymous deals to move prices in their own favour, extracting value from ordinary investors time and time again. Strategies such as wash, ladder and spoofing trades are rife, even on regulated exchanges – and in unregulated cryptocurrency exchanges one can even see these manipulative quotes happening real-time in the limit order book.  More generally, financial market misconduct and fraud affects about 15 percent of publicly listed companies each year and the resulting fines can devastate an organisation’s budget and initiate a tailspin from which it may never recover.

This book gives you a deeper understanding of all these issues to help prevent you and your company from falling victim to unethical practices.

• Learn about the different types of corruption and fraud and where they may be hiding in your organisation
• Identify improper relationships and conflicts of interest before they become a problem
• Understand the regulations surrounding market misconduct, and how they affect your firm
• Prevent budget-breaking fines and other potentially catastrophic consequences

Since the LIBOR scandal, many major banks have been fined billions of dollars for manipulation of prices, exchange rates and interest rates. Headline cases aside, misconduct and fraud is uncomfortably prevalent in a large number of financial firms; it can exist in a wide variety of forms, with practices in multiple departments, making self-governance complex. Corruption and Fraud in Financial Markets is a comprehensive guide to identifying and stopping potential problems before they reach the level of finable misconduct.

Douglas Cumming J.D., Ph.D., CFA, is a Professor of Finance and Entrepreneurship and the Ontario Research Chair at the Schulich School of Business, York University. Douglas has published over 140 articles in leading refereed academic journals in finance, management, and law and economics, such as the Academy of Management Journal, Journal of Financial Economics, Review of Financial Studies, Journal of Banking and Finance, Journal of International Business Studies and the Journal of Empirical Legal Studies. He is the Founding Editor of Annals of Corporate Governance, and Co-Editor of Finance Research Letters, and Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice, and has been a guest editor for 12 special issues of top journals, including Corporate Governance: An International Review, Journal of International Business Studies, Journal of Corporate Finance, Journal of Business Ethics, among others.  He is the coauthor of Venture Capital and Private Equity Contracting (Elsevier Academic Press, 2nd Edition, 2013), and Hedge Fund Structure, Regulation and Performance around the World (Oxford University Press, 2013). He is the Editor of the Oxford Handbook of Entrepreneurial Finance (Oxford University Press, 2013), the Oxford Handbook of Private Equity (Oxford University Press, 2013), and the Oxford Handbook of Venture Capital (Oxford University Press, 2013).

Carol Alexander is a Professor of Finance at the University of Sussex and Managing Editor of the Journal of Banking and Finance. From 1999 – 2012 she was Chair of Risk Management at the ICMA Centre in the Henley Business School at Reading. From 2010 – 2012 Carol was Chair of the Board of PRMIA (Professional Risk Manager’s International Association). Carol has held the following positions in financial institutions: Fixed Income Trader at UBS/Phillips and Drew (UK); Academic Director of Algorithmics (Canada); Director of Nikko Global Holdings and Head of Market Risk Modelling (UK); Risk Research Advisor, SAS (USA). She also acts as an expert witness and consultant in financial modelling. She publishes widely on a broad range of topics, including: volatility theory; option pricing and hedging; trading volatility; hedging with futures; alternative investments; random orthogonal matrix simulation; game theory and real options. She has written and edited numerous books in mathematics and finance and published extensively in top-ranked international journals. Her four-volume textbook on Market Risk Analysis (Wiley, 2008) is the definitive guide to the subject.