Trades Reconstructed

When the rogue actor is itself a model

Market manipulation and collusion are intent offenses: what the law forbids is not the pattern a trade leaves on the tape but the purpose behind it, the agreement, the intent to mislead, the design to move a price. When the trader is an autonomous model that reaches the same pattern on the tape while lacking the purpose or agreement behind it, the prohibition still describes the harm exactly and finds nothing it can call the offense.

Read the essay →

Structured reading

The Primer

The Primer takes the order–trade–fulfillment lifecycle, one record at a time. Each lesson traces a single stage: what the record captures, what names it, and how it moves. A newcomer can follow the mechanics from the first page; a practitioner can drop in at any stage and check the detail.

Start the Primer →

stage 01

Order

Where an order begins: the record it creates, the identifiers it carries, and the protocol that moves it.

stage 02

Trade

The moment of execution and the data it commits, from matched intent to the trade record itself.

Reading market manipulation

Interactives

Working models, not live feeds. Each opens on labeled data, a clean market beside a manipulated one, and traces the signal a compliance analyst checks. They illustrate the mechanics; they do not stand in for a market. Nothing here reads a live market, and nothing here is a surveillance tool.

Enter the lab →

Guided walkthrough

The reporting lifecycle

Where data originates, moves, is transformed, and must be reconstructed at each stage of the lifecycle.

Reconstruction

The reconstruction bench

Assemble a trade back from its scattered records and see what the audit trail can, and cannot, prove.