Matthew Goldstein of Reuters has an interesting article out today profiling Dan Hawke and the SEC’s resurgent Philadelphia office. The Philadelphia office–which Goldstein notes “sits atop an upscale shopping mall in downtown Philadelphia”–is now Ground Zero for the SEC’s new effort against market abuse. On January 13, 2010, Hawke was named as Chief of the SEC’s Market Abuse unit.
Hawke says that the focus of his group is “trader-based,” and not simply “securities-based.” By this he means that his team uses computers to take personal information about individual traders, such as where they went to school or where they used to work, and cross-check it against trading data on dozens of stocks. This is a variation on the SEC’s typical practice of pursuing a case only after learning of unusual activity in the trading of some security.
