“I know how to game this stuff.” “One can definitely manipulate if you’re aggressive.” “If you spoof this it really moves.” These excerpts from online chats among traders and hedge fund managers more than a decade ago played a key role in the Justice Department’s successful prosecution of two Wall Street traders in the latest trial to take on ”spoofing,” a form of market manipulation that was criminalized in the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act.

Brendan Bradley had a front row seat for the major exchange battles between open outcry trading and electronic trading after starting at the London International Financial Futures Exchange (LIFFE) in the 1980s and then moving to DTB in the mid-1990s. While there he saw the German Bund contract battle that shocked the global derivatives trading world and then later witnessed the competition between Eurex and the Chicago Board of Trade (CBOT) that he said ultimately led to the global leading exchange’s demise.