Tyler Durden, from zerohedge.com, explains the scapegoating of Nav Sarao:
Two months ago, nobody had heard of Navinder Sarao. Then, overnight, the gaunt, quiet 36-year old became a global sensation when five years after the historic May 2010 market crash, the US regulators did a 180 an thoroughly revised their “version” of who caused the Flash Crash, and instead of blaming a small mutual fund out of Kansas decided to unleash the wrath of the US justice system on a young trader that until late April had been a complete unknown among Wall Street’s power circles.
It all started when Scotland Yard arrived in a house in Hounslow, on the western fringes of London, where Nav Sarao was arrested on one late April morning. Wait, this wasn’t some dramatic perp walk out of a glass tower in Canary Wharf? No, for one simple reason: Sarao lived his parents. He also didn’t know how to drive.
And so begins one of the most fascinating profiles of a modern day financial mastermind: instead of tailored Saville Row suits, thundering parties, booming Bugattis and the occasional jaunt to the Riviera (or the Hamptons in the case of his US peers), Nav was the antithesis of a Wall Street. He was, in the words of Bloomberg which has created a fascinating profile of the young trading guru, “pathologically frugal” in fact “Sarao was so frugal it was almost an eccentricity.”
How was it possible that “a glorified day trader” was “living with his mom and dad near Heathrow Airport.”
As Bloomberg reports, “in this post-Madoff era, when giant banks plead guilty to felonies that would put ordinary perps behind bars, Sarao defies nearly everything we’ve come to expect from our financial villains. There was no Alain Ducasse in London, no après ski in Gstaad. Interviews with people who knew or worked with Sarao paint a very different portrait and, in some ways, a stranger one. Many spoke on the condition they not be named to avoid being drawn into the scandal.”
To continue reading: A Trading Floor Prodigy
