Federal regulators have ramped up their pursuit of traders who use a bluffing tactic known as spoofing to manipulate market prices, enforcement officials said, leading to a record number of manipulation cases, the Wall Street Journal reported. As part of the push, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission earlier this year quietly began receiving daily sets of market data from the world’s largest futures exchange, CME Group Inc. CME handles around 85 percent of total U.S. futures-markets trading by volume. Regulators for the first time now have access to daily trading data with a one-day delay, giving them a much broader window into trading activity — and possible manipulation. Previously, the CFTC largely relied on CME staff and whistleblowers to spot spoofing. The data-sharing agreement, effective as of February, comes as the CFTC and Justice Department both pursue traders engaged in spoofing, a practice outlawed by the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act. The CFTC brought a record 26 cases related to manipulative conduct and spoofing in the fiscal year ended Sept. 30. Several of those civil cases were accompanied by criminal charges filed by the Justice Department. Between 2009 and 2016, the average number of such cases brought was just five a year.
