Order Flow and Options Manipulators: The Heinous Crimes of Citadel and Susquehanna
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| Author       | Source       | 
| :-------------: |:-------------:|
|  [u/beowulf77](https://www.reddit.com/user/beowulf77/) | [Reddit](https://www.reddit.com/r/Superstonk/comments/mn5bis/order_flow_and_options_manipulators_the_heinous/) | 

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[DD 👨‍🔬](https://www.reddit.com/r/Superstonk/search?q=flair_name%3A%22DD%20%F0%9F%91%A8%E2%80%8D%F0%9F%94%AC%22&restrict_sr=1)

A short story fan fiction posted on behalf of Wuz:

<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZRfnWpV4i7E>

Why are 75%+ of their portfolios in options?

Why are they paying brokers for their order flow?

Imagine you are playing poker, except you see half of the table's hands. This is the equivalent information of seeing 40% of order flow through your quant code. Next imagine you are playing roulette as the house except you get to choose where the ball lands. This is how they are abusing the options market with flash crashes, spikes, and EOD pricing. These metaphors are the essence of how these funds have stolen gigantic sums of money from retail traders.

If you were at a poker table where you could see certain opponents hands would you not be more inclined to play hands against them? The order flow they are paying for is almost exclusively retail investors. Who are they most inclined to manipulate and bet against? The shown hands of their opponents aka retail securities and options buyers. Did we forget what WSB was most known for? Options loss porn and margin calls. If you can see the entire retail options spread, while simultaneously having the ability to bet on your own options, you can tell the price points that facilitate the most pain for your order flow and additionally cash in your own bets to skew the cost/profit equation of manipulating the price in your favor. Also, flash crashes and high volatility lend themselves to more margin calls and more pain for undercapitalized entities.

Sadly, it goes much much deeper than just these indiscretions. Not only are they betting against their own order flow, they are using it to win. Failure to Delivers does not only include short sale borrowing... It also includes when the buyer or seller of a security fails to deliver the share or payment. <https://www.investopedia.com/terms/f/failuretodeliver.asp>

In battleground stocks or stocks that have upcoming important dates or earnings calls these MMs are holding their buys and sells (converting them to FTDs) and using this "ammo" to activate their own option spreads and decimating retail with easy to program quant data given to them from these broker's order flow. Cost analysis is the basis for most of these plays. I.e. It will cost us $XXX million to sell through X basis points and activate $XXX million worth of our options. Imagine if you don't even have to use your own shares/capital to be doing the buying and selling: the possibilities for manipulation are truly endless and your cost/benefit analysis will almost FOREVER be in your favor. And guess which stocks they will ultimately have the most "ammo" for? The stocks bought and sold most heavily by retail. All they are required to do is deliver the share (eventually) or pay the broker for the sale - There is no record or tracking mechanism for the actual free market transaction. This is why they don't need to own shares - they get them daily from their order flow. This is also why the DTCC has put stronger restrictions on FTDs and non-delivery of securities.

[Poker](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poker) and other games are an important part of the SIG company culture. The founders and senior traders believe that poker teaches lessons on decision making under conditions of uncertainty. SIG hosts an internal poker tournament annually and has even used poker as a recruiting tool.[[14]](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susquehanna_International_Group#cite_note-14) The company employs [Bill Chen](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Chen), a [World Series of Poker](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Series_of_Poker) star, in its quantitative trading group.[[15]](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susquehanna_International_Group#cite_note-15)

<https://sig.com/quantitative-trading/game-theory/>

With Steve Bloom, Eric Brooks, Arthur Dantchik, Andrew Frost, and Joel Greenberg, Jerry Yass founded a firm in May 1987 to deploy their poker skills in the options markets. All founding members of Susquehanna were professional poker players. Nov 22, 2018

They are playing poker against us, but they can see our cards.

<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FpNWvxE9nXY>

Edit: you know its good when the susquehanna shills are commenting

Edit2: Wuz: I bet if you were to audit Robinhood inflow and outflow of funds you would find a HUGE imbalance of losses especially on options trades. When GME mooned they had never had that many people "win" before they didn't have the cash to cover it.

edit 3: The massive volume we are seeing in the after hours glitches is Citadel transferring shares back and forth to cover FTD's from shorts but also a metric shit ton of retail buys that they have never truly delivered to the brokers (don't panic your broker is still liable for your share even if Shitadel didn't buy it). The less shares they have to do these dark pool trades with the more frequently (higher volume) they need to trade the shares back and forth to cover the ever increasing FTD's. They are also using deep ITM calls as covers for their short interest. This is why we see a decrease in short interest, but no true upward buying pressure. This is why we see daily 5 and 6 figure FTD numbers with no true upward buying pressure.
