Is this illegal? LOL

Pretty sure this is illegal but I'm gonna throw it out there: Say you want to gift a politician money and assuming you had a broker that was willing to comply. Could you essentially bribe them by having your broker enter two opposite futures trades at the same price? Assuming the fact that futures are a single sum game wouldn't this be a way to manipulate money through the financial system to bribe someone? I am not looking to insider trade or break any rules, I'm just wondering

 

Where's the part where the politician gets paid? Also, you know campaign donations are legal right?

Nothing funnier than someone who thinks they're being bad when they're not. Reminds me of the SNL skit where these two PBS radio hosts are talking about how drunk they're getting sipping eggnog during their show, and then they read the label and its non alcoholic eggnog.

 
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Yes it is certainly illegal. There’s a lot wrong here and I’ll try to sort this out. Futures trading is not a single sum game - what ever the fuck that means; it is a zero sum game: for every dollar you make some one has to lose a dollar. In reality it is a negative sum game once you account for exchange fees, brokerage, and other transaction costs, but that’s not the point here.

What you described above (buying and selling a futures contract at the same price) is known as a wash sale and is illegal because it can be used to hide and launder money. The alphabet soup of regulatory agencies will catch this so quickly it will make your head spin, so don’t try it. An older trader I know tried this at my old and was caught in 2 weeks. He was personally fined $100k and fired immediately. Attempting to do this would be more obvious than the whole Bill Tsai thing.

 

Yeah I agree OP didn’t make much sense here. The single sum game thing made no sense to me; he probably means zero sum game. I thought he was asking about how to move money around and make it look legit and the buy and sell at the same time just sounded like a wash sale to me.

Wash sales can also be used to shift money around if I’m not mistaken; I could be off the mark on this one though. I’m not a compliance whiz.

 

No they don’t think she did what was described. As the author said at same price.

Between two accounts you could definitely launder money though especially in illiquid securities. One count basically makes the market on something with a wide bid/ask and the other account fills the guy on the bid asks.

Cattle might be a possibility for that.

 

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