Gold Trader’s Chat Shows ‘How Easy’ Price Manipulation Is (1)

Chat logs introduced as evidence by prosecutors at the Chicago spoofing trial of two former precious-metals traders for Bank of America Corp.’s Merrill Lynch unit show one of them, Edward Bases, bragging about how easy it was to manipulate prices.

On Jan. 28, 2009, when Bases was working at Deutsche Bank AG, he put out bids to buy 2,740 gold futures contracts valued around $244 million over the course of four and a half minutes, according to Maria Garibotti, a vice president at Analysis Group who studied exchange and trading data for prosecutors. More than 98% were ...