Cherry-Picking Cases: SEC, CFTC, DOJ Enforcement and Defense
Cherry-Picking Enforcement: How the SEC, CFTC, and DOJ Build Trade Allocation Cases, and Where the Defense Begins
Two cherry-picking cases have been filed in the past four weeks. On September 17, 2026, the U.S. Attorney's Office in Manhattan filed a securities fraud information against an investment adviser who, according to the charging document, spent seven years assigning winning trades to himself and losing trades to the 50 to 70 clients he managed each year. On October 6, 2026, the SEC sued a California adviser and his one-person firm over the same conduct, compressed into five months. These filings follow a November 2024 indictment of the chief investment officer of a global fixed-income manager, and a 2023 criminal case and parallel CFTC action against a commodity pool operator who steered profitable crypto, foreign exchange, and equity index futures trades away from his investors.
Cherry-picking was once treated as a small-adviser problem. The recent cases involve a senior portfolio manager at a firm with roughly $300 billion under management, a registered commodity pool operator trading futures, and advisers trading crypto derivatives, alongside the sole practitioners who have always been the typical defendants.
Overview: Why Cherry-Picking Cases Are Back in the News
Three developments explain the pace. The first is data. Each of these cases rests on a comparison of first-day returns in the favored account against first-day returns in client accounts, and on a calculation of how unlikely that split would be by chance. Once the custodian's trade blotter is in hand, the analysis is a matter of days. The second is that custodians and clearing brokers are watching allocation timing themselves. In the October 2026 case, the custodian confronted the adviser and terminated him months before the SEC sued. The third is that the SEC, the CFTC, and the Justice Department work from the same records. The same trade blotter supports a civil fraud complaint, a regulatory violation under CFTC rules, and a felony charge, and in the cases discussed below it did all three.
That combination makes additional cases likely, and the timing of the recent filings suggests the agencies have a pipeline.
What Cherry-Picking Is and How It Works
Cherry-picking is trade allocation fraud. An adviser places an order without assigning it to a particular account, waits to see which way the price moves, and then assigns the trade based on the result. The profitable trades go to the account the adviser wants to help, and the unprofitable trades go to clients.
The mechanics were the same in every case discussed here. An adviser with discretionary authority trades through a block, omnibus, average-price, or suspense account at a broker-dealer or futures commission merchant. The account holds the trade until the adviser tells the custodian which client owns it, and custodians will accept those instructions hours after execution. In the futures markets, the instruction can come at the end of the trading day. That window between execution and allocation is where the fraud happens.
Block trading itself is lawful and common. Firms aggregate orders so that every client gets the same price and transaction costs come down, and both the SEC and the CFTC permit the practice. What the law requires is that the allocation be decided without regard to how the trade performed, and that no account receive consistently better or worse treatment than the others. The SEC's 2019 interpretation of the adviser fiduciary standard addresses the allocation of investment opportunities as part of the duty of loyalty, which requires an adviser to disclose conflicts and to refrain from favoring its own interests over a client's. On the futures side, CFTC Regulation 1.35(b)(5) permits post-execution allocation of bunched orders only if the allocations are fair and equitable.
Who receives the favored trades varies. In two of the four matters it was the adviser's own personal account. In the chief investment officer case it was a flagship strategy that charged roughly four times the fees of the disfavored strategies, together with two long-standing client accounts. In the commodity pool case it was the trading accounts of two entities, one owned by the adviser and the other controlled by his brother. In every case, the losing trades went to clients.
The proof is statistical, and then it is specific. The government compares first-day returns in the favored and disfavored accounts and calculates the probability that the split occurred by chance. In the October 2026 SEC complaint, that probability is less than one in a million. In the chief investment officer case, it is less than one in a trillion. The complaints then illustrate the pattern with individual trading days. In one example, the adviser bought 1,000 shares of the same stock twice in the same afternoon, at $112.09 and then at $106.70. At 3:59 p.m. he assigned the higher-priced lot to three clients. At 4:00 p.m. he sold 1,000 shares at $109.85, and at 4:03 p.m. he assigned the lower-priced purchase and the sale to himself. The clients were down more than $5,200 at the moment of allocation. He had locked in a gain of more than $3,100.
Common Allegations Across SEC, CFTC, and DOJ Cherry-Picking Cases
The four matters generated two SEC complaints, a CFTC complaint and consent order, and three criminal charging documents, filed by different offices over three years. They read as though they came from the same outline. Each one rests on the same eight allegations.
1. A Fiduciary With Discretion
Each defendant had authority to trade without consulting the client. The securities cases plead investment adviser status under Section 202(a)(11) of the Advisers Act; the futures cases plead commodity pool operator and commodity trading advisor status under the Commodity Exchange Act. Both frameworks carry a duty of loyalty, and the government pleads that duty as the foundation of the fraud.
2. An Account That Separates Execution From Allocation
The vehicle differs from case to case: a block account at a broker-dealer, omnibus accounts at seven brokers, suspense accounts at futures commission merchants that accepted an end-of-day allocation file. The function is the same. Each one allowed the defendant to execute first and allocate later.
3. Delay
The chief investment officer typically allocated after 4 p.m. Eastern, once the Chicago Mercantile Exchange had set the daily settlement price. The commodity pool operator sent his allocation file at the end of each trading day. The California adviser allocated after watching intraday price movement. Every pleading treats the delay itself as evidence of the scheme.
4. No Contemporaneous Record of Intent
The California adviser admitted to his custodian that he had no record of allocations made before the outcome was known, even though his Form ADV brochure promised a written pre-allocation statement for every aggregated order. The chief investment officer did not use his firm's electronic ticketing system, which would have recorded an allocation before the trade. Instead, he phoned his allocations to an assistant hours later.
5. A Statistical Disparity
The government measures first-day performance in the favored and disfavored accounts, and in each case the gap is wide.
| Case | First-Day Disparity the Government Alleges |
|---|---|
| Adviser, 2015 to 2022 | 70 percent of the trades he assigned to himself had same-day gains, against 16 percent of trades assigned to clients. He realized about $6 million. |
| California adviser, 2023 to 2024 | 95.8 percent of trades allocated to his own account were profitable, against 14.9 percent of trades allocated to 16 client accounts. The complaint pleads $158,458 in first-day profits for him and $143,754 in first-day losses for clients. |
| Chief investment officer, 2021 to 2023 | 80 percent of the Treasury futures and options trades allocated specifically to his flagship strategy had first-day gains, against 25 percent for the disfavored strategies. The favored portfolios showed net first-day gains in each of 34 consecutive months and over $600 million in total. The disfavored portfolios showed over $600 million in net first-day losses. |
| Commodity pool operator, 2019 to 2021 | Proprietary accounts were profitable in 31 of 34 months. The crypto pool account that received his allocations was profitable in 2 of 22 months. One proprietary account went from $444.50 to $60,847 in a single month. |
6. A Control Group
The most persuasive technique in these pleadings is the comparison to trades the defendant could not cherry-pick. One broker allocated the chief investment officer's trades to the flagship strategy by default, and those trades showed no first-day bias. After his firm removed his authority over the disfavored strategies in October 2023, the flagship's first-day performance fell to roughly break-even. The defendant's own trading supplied the baseline.
7. Written Promises of Fairness
Form ADV brochures said no account would be favored. Private placement memoranda promised fair and equitable allocation. Due diligence questionnaires described a trade-flow process in which allocation preceded execution. Firm policies prohibited allocation based on first-day performance. The government pleads each of these twice, once as a misstatement and once as proof that the defendant knew the rule he was breaking.
8. Concealment After the Fact
One adviser falsely told the SEC he had never reassigned personal trades to clients. The chief investment officer testified under oath that he had an allocation in mind when he placed each order. The California adviser told clients he had chosen to leave his custodian over service problems when the custodian had in fact terminated him over his allocations. The commodity pool operator told investors his pools traded crypto and foreign exchange futures when roughly 45 percent of the trading was in equity index futures. In each case the cover-up became its own allegation, and in one case its own felony count.
Two further themes run through the pleadings. The government always identifies the benefit to the defendant, whether direct profit, incentive fees from a related account, or compensation tied to a strategy's performance. And both SEC complaints describe the scheme as inherently deceptive because clients cannot see how their adviser allocates trades. That characterization allows the SEC to plead scheme liability without identifying a specific false statement to each client.
SEC Cherry-Picking Actions: Key Allegations and Charges
The SEC pleads cherry-picking three ways at once: as a deceptive scheme, as a false statement case, and as a breach of fiduciary duty that can be established on negligence alone. The two complaints discussed here, one filed in October 2026 against a small California adviser and one filed in November 2024 against the chief investment officer of a global bond manager, follow the same structure even though the dollars at stake differ by several orders of magnitude.
Scheme Liability Without a False Statement
The SEC's lead claims rest on Rule 10b-5(a) and (c) and Securities Act Section 17(a)(1) and (3). The theory is that the allocation itself deceives. Both complaints allege that cherry-picking is virtually impossible for clients to detect because clients cannot see how trades are allocated, which allows the SEC to proceed without proving a specific misrepresentation to any particular client.
Form ADV as a Second Theory
The October 2026 complaint adds misstatement claims under Rule 10b-5(b) and Section 17(a)(2) based on three sentences in the adviser's Form ADV Part 2A brochure: that no account would be favored over another, that a written allocation statement would be prepared before every aggregated order, and that every account would participate at the average share price. The SEC alleges that each sentence was false when filed and that a reasonable client would have considered it important.
Negligence as the Fallback
Section 206(2) of the Advisers Act and Sections 17(a)(2) and (3) of the Securities Act do not require intent, and both complaints plead negligence in the alternative. If the statistical evidence falls short of proving scienter, the SEC still has a path to an injunction, disgorgement, and penalties.
State Registration Does Not Help
The October 2026 defendant was registered with California rather than the SEC and managed about $54.6 million for 64 clients. Section 206 applies to any investment adviser, registered or not. The SEC also imputed the owner's mental state to his firm and sought disgorgement from both on a joint and several basis.
The Custodian's Warning as Evidence of Intent
In April 2024, an employee of the adviser's custodian called him and said he had noticed preferential block trade allocations made after the outcome of the trade was known. He asked for evidence that allocations had been recorded in advance. The adviser said he had none, and he continued allocating the same way. Later that month the custodian terminated the relationship in writing, citing concerns with trading. Two days after receiving that letter, the adviser emailed his clients that he had decided to move platforms because of poor service. The SEC pleads the continued trading as evidence of scienter and the email as a lulling statement that breached the duty of loyalty.
Mutual Funds and the Investment Company Act
Registered funds were among the disfavored portfolios in the chief investment officer case, so the SEC added claims under Section 36(a) of the Investment Company Act, which covers breach of fiduciary duty involving personal misconduct by a fund adviser, and Section 37, which covers theft or embezzlement of fund assets. The complaint alleges that the defendant effectively stole assets from the disfavored portfolios. Section 37 is a larceny provision, and its appearance in an allocation case indicates how the SEC views the conduct.
Unrealized Gains and Personal Benefit
The SEC acknowledges that the chief investment officer's first-day results were primarily unrealized, and it pleads harm anyway. Daily performance was calculated and reported inside the firm every day, and a trade that starts with a gain is more likely to end with one. The complaint then connects the scheme to the defendant's compensation, which ranged from $28 million to $30 million a year in incentive pay when the firm performed well and fell to $21 million in 2022. In March 2023, the same month he allocated more than $100 million in net first-day gains to his flagship strategy, he moved roughly $19 million of his own deferred compensation into that strategy and out of the disfavored ones.
In September 2024, the SEC settled with two advisory firms over their failure to supervise two representatives who had cherry-picked for years. The order found violations of Sections 206(2) and 206(4) and Rule 206(4)-7, found the firms' Forms ADV misleading, and imposed a $200,000 penalty on each firm. One of the two representatives named in that order is the defendant in the September 2026 criminal information. The firms settled first. The individual was charged with a felony two years later.
The SEC has run a data-driven cherry-picking initiative since 2015, in which enforcement staff and economists from the Division of Economic and Risk Analysis review custodian trade allocation data to identify advisers who disproportionately allocate profitable trades to favored accounts. The 2024 firm-level case originated in the Market Abuse Unit's Analysis and Detection Center. A client complaint is not a prerequisite to an investigation.
SEC Charges
| Provision | Theory |
|---|---|
| Securities Act Section 17(a)(1), (2), and (3)15 U.S.C. § 77q(a) | Fraud in the offer or sale of securities. Subsections (a)(2) and (a)(3) require only negligence. |
| Exchange Act Section 10(b) and Rule 10b-5(a), (b), and (c)15 U.S.C. § 78j(b); 17 C.F.R. § 240.10b-5 | Scheme liability for the allocations themselves under (a) and (c); misstatement liability for Form ADV representations under (b). |
| Advisers Act Sections 206(1) and 206(2)15 U.S.C. § 80b-6 | Fraud by an investment adviser and breach of fiduciary duty. Applies to state-registered and unregistered advisers. Section 206(2) requires only negligence. |
| Investment Company Act Sections 36(a) and 3715 U.S.C. §§ 80a-35(a), 80a-36 | Breach of fiduciary duty involving personal misconduct, and theft or embezzlement of fund assets, where registered funds are among the disfavored accounts. |
The SEC sought permanent injunctions, a conduct-based injunction barring association with any broker, dealer, or investment adviser, disgorgement with prejudgment interest on a joint and several basis, and civil penalties. In the chief investment officer case it also sought an officer-and-director bar and an injunction against participating in any securities transaction other than for his personal accounts.
CFTC Cherry-Picking Actions: Key Allegations and Charges
In the futures markets, cherry-picking is both a fraud and a regulatory violation that requires no proof of intent. The CFTC's action against a registered commodity pool operator and commodity trading advisor, filed in April 2023 and resolved by consent order in September 2025, shows how the Commission builds the case and how far its remedies reach.
Bunched Orders and End-of-Day Allocation Files
The defendant placed bunched orders in suspense accounts at futures commission merchants on behalf of two commodity pools, several managed accounts, and two proprietary accounts. At the end of each trading day he emailed or uploaded a data file telling the FCM which contracts belonged to which account, and the FCMs allocated accordingly.
Average-Price Allocation as Cover
He instructed the FCMs to allocate on an average-price basis, so that every account received the same price per contract. On its face, that is a fair process. The cherry-picking happened at the contract level. On May 20, 2019, for example, round-trip trades in E-mini S&P Midcap 400 and E-mini Russell 2000 futures produced $8,307 in realized profits, and those went to a proprietary account. Round-trip trades in E-mini S&P 500 futures lost $6,937.50, and those went to the crypto pool, which was also left holding the day's open positions. Because he typically opened and closed positions in the suspense account before allocating, he knew the realized profit or loss on every contract before he decided who owned it.
Regulation 1.35 as a Standalone Count
CFTC Regulation 1.35(b)(5)(iv)(B) requires that post-execution allocations of bunched orders be fair and equitable and that no account or group of accounts receive consistently favorable or unfavorable treatment. The consent order finds a violation of that regulation separate from the fraud counts. The regulation is concerned with the pattern rather than the registrant's state of mind, so a registrant whose allocations are consistently lopsided has a regulatory problem before anyone proves fraud.
Pooled Margin and Proprietary Profits
The order explains how a proprietary account could earn 2,457 percent in a single month on a $10,000 deposit. Combining customer money with proprietary money in bunched orders allowed the defendant to post margin for larger positions and more contracts than the proprietary accounts could have supported on their own. The customers supplied the capital that made the profitable trades possible, and the proprietary accounts received the profits. Over the relevant period the proprietary accounts earned $1,633,119 and were profitable in more than 91 percent of months. The crypto pool account that received the bunched-order allocations lost at least $1,159,657, the FX pool account was profitable in 2 of 10 months, and customer accounts lost at least $1,208,503 overall.
Related Parties and Offshore Accounts
One proprietary account belonged to a company the defendant owned. The other belonged to a Nevis corporation controlled by his brother, with bank accounts outside the United States. More than $600,000 moved from the first company's trading accounts to its bank accounts and then on to the defendant's personal accounts. More than $850,000 moved from the Nevis entity's trading accounts to foreign banks. The Nevis entity also paid the defendant's firm $338,783.66 in management and incentive fees calculated on the cherry-picked profits. The CFTC named the defendant's company as a relief defendant and obtained a joint and several disgorgement obligation of $701,647.67 against it.
The Marketed Strategy and the Real One
The pools were marketed as cryptocurrency futures and foreign exchange futures strategies, but about 45 percent of the trading for each pool was in equity index futures. The private placement memoranda also promised fair and equitable allocation among the pools and the proprietary accounts. The CFTC pleads both representations as fraud under Sections 4b and 4o, and it holds the individual liable as a controlling person under Section 13(b) and the firm liable for its agent's conduct under Section 2(a)(1)(B) and Regulation 1.2, so neither can distance itself from the other.
CFTC Charges
| Provision | Theory |
|---|---|
| CEA Section 4b(a)(1)(A) through (C)7 U.S.C. § 6b | Cheating or defrauding, making false reports, and willfully deceiving customers in connection with futures contracts. Each allocation is a separate violation. |
| CEA Section 4o(1)(A) and (B)7 U.S.C. § 6o | Fraud by a commodity pool operator, commodity trading advisor, or associated person on pool participants and clients. |
| Regulation 1.35(b)(5)(iv)(B)17 C.F.R. § 1.35 | Inequitable post-execution allocation of bunched orders. A standalone count that requires no proof of intent. |
| CEA Sections 13(b) and 2(a)(1)(B); Regulation 1.27 U.S.C. § 13c(b); 7 U.S.C. § 2(a)(1)(B) | Controlling person liability for the individual; principal liability for the firm for its agent's acts. |
The consent order imposes a permanent injunction, a six-year ban on trading any commodity interest or digital asset commodity, including bitcoin, for the defendants' own accounts, a permanent bar on controlling anyone else's trading, soliciting funds, or registering with the CFTC in any capacity, restitution of $1,208,503, disgorgement of $1,633,119, and a cooperation obligation. The defendants receive dollar-for-dollar credit for restitution and forfeiture paid in the parallel criminal case, and the assets frozen at the start of the civil case were applied to the criminal judgment. The order also incorporates every fact admitted in the criminal plea agreement and bars the defendants from publicly denying any of them.
DOJ Criminal Cherry-Picking Cases: Key Allegations and Charges
The Justice Department has filed three cherry-picking cases in three years: a 2023 information in the Southern District of Florida brought by the Fraud Section, a 2024 indictment in the Southern District of New York against a chief investment officer, and a 2026 information in the same district against a small adviser. The charging decisions in those cases say a good deal about how prosecutors approach this conduct.
Regulatory Statutes Charged as Crimes
Prosecutors did not limit themselves to wire fraud. The 2024 indictment charges willful violations of Advisers Act Section 206 through 15 U.S.C. § 80b-17, which carries up to five years; securities fraud under Section 10(b) and 15 U.S.C. § 78ff, which carries up to 20 years; and commodity trading advisor fraud under Section 4o and commodities fraud under Section 6(c)(1) and Regulation 180.1, each a felony under 7 U.S.C. § 13(a)(5) with up to ten years. The 2023 case charged conspiracy to commit commodities fraud under 18 U.S.C. § 1348, a statute that on its own carries up to 25 years. The trading records that support an SEC or CFTC complaint support each of these counts as well.
An Information Usually Means a Plea
Two of the three cases were charged by information rather than indictment, which means the defendant waived the grand jury. The 2023 defendant was charged on September 19, 2023 and pleaded guilty on October 11, 2023. He was sentenced to 24 months in prison and ordered to pay $1,208,503 in restitution and $1,633,119 in forfeiture. The September 2026 information follows the same pattern and most likely reflects a negotiated resolution.
The Indictment as Expert Report
The 2024 indictment lays out the chief investment officer's allocation statistics in layers. Across all of his Treasury futures and options trades, 55 percent had first-day gains. Among trades he allocated specifically to his flagship strategy, 80 percent had gains. Among trades he allocated specifically to the disfavored strategies, 75 percent had losses. Of more than 500 trades with first-day gains above $500,000, he sent more than 90 percent to the flagship, and of more than 200 trades with first-day losses above $1 million, he sent fewer than 5 percent there. The indictment then supplies the control group: trades a broker allocated to the flagship by default showed no bias, and after the firm revoked his authority over the disfavored strategies in October 2023, the flagship's average first-day return went from a gain of more than $225,000 per trade to a loss of about $1,500. That comparison is built so a jury can follow it without expert testimony.
Motive
The indictment alleges that the chief investment officer held a large position in Russian sovereign debt that was nearly wiped out after the 2022 invasion of Ukraine and a significant position in Credit Suisse debt that lost its value when the bank collapsed in 2023. The flagship strategy's assets fell by about 80 percent, and the firm ran a retention campaign to keep clients from redeeming. Flagship investors paid roughly four times the fees of core investors, and the firm's internal scorecards credited the defendant with all of the flagship's revenue but only a share of the core strategies' revenue. The government's theory is that he cherry-picked to repair a strategy that carried his name and drove his compensation.
Compliance Training and Willfulness
The indictment quotes the firm's policy that investment decisions must never be based on an objective to allocate profitable trades to particular accounts to make up for past performance or to benefit the firm through a higher fee structure. It also cites an August 2021 compliance email warning that the SEC is concerned advisers might use knowledge of market movements to allocate winning trades to certain accounts. The SEC complaint draws on the same record, including a 2018 training in which the chief compliance officer warned that regulators look at time stamps and a 2022 training that described a trade executed at 8 a.m. and allocated at noon as a bad-facts scenario. The training existed to prevent the conduct, and in the charging documents it establishes that the defendant knew the rule.
False Statements to the SEC
On March 6, 2024, the chief investment officer testified before the SEC that he typically had an allocation in mind when he placed an order, and he gave the same answer when the question was repeated. The indictment charges that testimony as a false statement under 18 U.S.C. § 1001, which carries its own five-year maximum. The 2026 information likewise alleges that the adviser falsely told the SEC he had never reassigned personal trades to clients. In both cases, testimony given in the civil investigation became evidence in the criminal case, and in one it became a separate count. A false statement to investigators can also support an obstruction enhancement at sentencing.
Conspiracy and Offshore Proceeds
The 2023 case charged a conspiracy with a Russian national living in Istanbul who controlled a Nevis corporation and bank accounts in Belarus and Dominica. The overt act pleaded was a single June 2020 email to a futures commission merchant containing allocation instructions. The defendant used proceeds to pay rent on a beachfront apartment and moved other proceeds through an FDIC-insured bank to foreign accounts, and the FDIC Office of Inspector General investigated the case. DOJ described it as the first criminal charge against a commodity trading advisor and pool operator for cherry-picking involving cryptocurrency futures.
Timing and Forfeiture
The 2026 information covers conduct from January 2015 through August 2022. The SEC resolved its failure-to-supervise case against the adviser's former firms in September 2024, and the criminal charge followed in September 2026, four years after the conduct ended. Securities fraud offenses carry a six-year statute of limitations under 18 U.S.C. § 3301, so conduct that ended in August 2022 remains chargeable until August 2028. Each case also includes a forfeiture allegation under 18 U.S.C. § 981(a)(1)(C) and 28 U.S.C. § 2461(c), with substitute assets available under 21 U.S.C. § 853(p). In the 2023 case, the $1,633,119 forfeiture equals the proprietary accounts' total profits rather than the net of what the pools lost, and restitution of $1,208,503 was ordered in addition.
DOJ Charges
| Case | Counts |
|---|---|
| 2023 information, S.D. Fla. (Fraud Section) | Conspiracy to commit commodities fraud, 18 U.S.C. § 371, with the object of violating 18 U.S.C. § 1348(1) and (2). Guilty plea. Sentence of 24 months. |
| 2024 indictment, S.D.N.Y. | Investment adviser fraud, 15 U.S.C. §§ 80b-6 and 80b-17. Securities fraud, 15 U.S.C. §§ 78j(b) and 78ff, and 17 C.F.R. § 240.10b-5. Commodity trading advisor fraud, 7 U.S.C. §§ 6o and 13(a)(5). Commodities fraud, 7 U.S.C. §§ 9(1) and 13(a)(5), and 17 C.F.R. § 180.1. False statements, 18 U.S.C. § 1001(a)(1) and (2). |
| 2026 information, S.D.N.Y. | Securities fraud, 15 U.S.C. §§ 78j(b) and 78ff, and 17 C.F.R. § 240.10b-5. |
Each case carries a forfeiture allegation, and the two New York cases also cite 18 U.S.C. § 2 on every count.
How Cherry-Picking Cases Cut Across Securities, Commodities, and Crypto
The legal theory does not depend on the instrument. A fiduciary who allocates after seeing the result has defrauded the client whether the trade was in a stock, a Treasury future, a bitcoin future, or a yen contract. What changes is which agency shows up and which statutes it uses.
| Matter | Instruments and Agencies | Government's Figures |
|---|---|---|
| Adviser with 50 to 70 clients a yearJan. 2015 to Aug. 2022 · Favored: his personal account | Equities. DOJ information, S.D.N.Y., Sept. 2026. SEC settled order against his former firms, Sept. 2024. | 70% of own trades gained vs. 16% of client trades. About $6 million in gains. |
| State-registered adviser, 16 client accountsDec. 2023 to Apr. 2024 · Favored: his personal account | Equities. SEC complaint, S.D. Cal., Oct. 2026. | 95.8% vs. 14.9% profitable. $158,458 in gains; $143,754 in client losses. Less than 1 in 1 million by chance. |
| Chief investment officer of a $300 billion bond managerJan. 2021 to Oct. 2023 · Favored: flagship strategy and two client accounts | Treasury futures and options on Treasury futures. SEC complaint and DOJ indictment, S.D.N.Y., Nov. 2024. | Over $600 million net first-day gains vs. over $600 million net first-day losses. 34 consecutive months. Less than 1 in 1 trillion by chance. |
| Registered commodity pool operator and trading advisorJan. 2019 to Nov. 2021 · Favored: proprietary accounts of entities controlled by the defendant and his brother | Cryptocurrency, FX, and equity index futures. CFTC complaint, S.D. Fla., Apr. 2023. DOJ information, S.D. Fla., Sept. 2023. | $1,633,119 in proprietary profits; $1,208,503 in customer losses. Proprietary accounts profitable 31 of 34 months. |
Securities
When the instrument is a stock or a fund interest, the Advisers Act fiduciary duty and Section 206 control, alongside Section 10(b) and Section 17(a). If a registered mutual fund is among the disfavored accounts, the Investment Company Act adds Sections 36(a) and 37. The SEC and DOJ share the case.
Futures
Treasury futures, equity index futures, crypto futures, and foreign exchange futures are commodity interests under the Commodity Exchange Act, which brings in Section 4b, Section 4o, Section 6(c)(1) with Regulation 180.1, and Regulation 1.35. An adviser who trades futures for client accounts is a commodity trading advisor for purposes of the Act whether or not registered as one. The 2024 indictment charged the chief investment officer of an SEC-registered bond manager as a commodity trading advisor and as an associated person of a commodity pool operator, and his securities registration did nothing to keep the commodities counts out of the case.
Crypto
Bitcoin and ether futures traded on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange are commodity interests, and the CFTC treats bitcoin and other digital assets as commodities under the Act. The 2023 case charged cherry-picking in cryptocurrency futures under the same provisions that apply to Russell 2000 futures, and the consent order's six-year trading ban extends to digital asset commodities, including bitcoin, held in the defendants' own accounts. Regulation 180.1 reaches fraud in connection with any commodity in interstate commerce, so an adviser who allocates spot crypto trades after the fact faces the same exposure as one who allocates futures. One scheme can therefore draw the SEC and DOJ, the CFTC and DOJ, or all three, and DOJ can charge 18 U.S.C. § 1348 for securities fraud and commodities fraud alike. A manager who runs equities, Treasury derivatives, and crypto futures through the same block account has created exposure to all three agencies from a single set of records.
Defenses in Cherry-Picking Cases
Every one of these cases was built from the same three materials: trading data, the defendant's own documents and communications, and the testimony of people who worked alongside him. The statistics get the headlines. The communications and the witnesses decide the case, because the statistics describe a pattern and the government still has to prove what the defendant intended when he produced it. A defense has to engage with all three, and the way it engages with the last two is what separates a trial defense from a negotiated plea.
The Data Can Be Sliced More Than One Way
A probability figure like one in a trillion sounds like a verdict. It is the output of a model, and every model reflects choices. The government chooses the measurement window, which in these cases is first-day or intraday performance rather than how the position ultimately did. It chooses the universe of trades. The 2024 indictment discloses in footnotes that its figures exclude trades that were paired with other trades in the firm's system and, for the flagship-specific numbers, exclude trades placed through the broker with a default allocation. It chooses the comparison groups, treating trades allocated specifically to one strategy differently from trades split evenly between them. And it chooses the statistical assumptions, including whether each trade is treated as an independent event. Trades in the same instrument on the same day move together, and a model that counts correlated trades as independent draws overstates how improbable the result is. Each of those choices may be defensible. Each is also contestable, and a different analyst applying different but reasonable choices can produce a different picture of the same blotter.
The government anticipated the most obvious challenge. The SEC complaint in the chief investment officer case pleads that strategy differences do not explain the disparity, pointing to a disfavored-strategy portfolio that received preferential allocations and to days on which the same instrument was allocated both ways. That is where a defense economist starts, because the firm's own disclosures said allocations could differ between benchmarked and unconstrained strategies, and the flagship mandate, risk limits, and position sizing may explain some of what the aggregate statistics attribute to intent. The measure of harm is also open. The SEC concedes that most of the first-day results were unrealized. The crypto case treats gross proprietary profits as the forfeiture figure without netting the pools' results. Loss amount drives the sentencing range, the restitution order, and the disgorgement figure, and it is calculated from the same data the liability case rests on.
Contemporaneous Communications Decide Intent
Each of these cases turned on a documentary record: compliance emails and training decks, trade confirmations, phone logs, the adviser's emails to clients, private placement memoranda, and sworn testimony. The government mined that record for knowledge and quoted it in the charging documents. The same record is where good faith lives, if it exists. Emails to compliance about allocation practices, instructions to a trading assistant, draft allocation tickets, a message explaining why a particular trade belonged in a particular strategy, questions to the custodian about the limits of its allocation portal, and prior periods in which the supposedly favored account absorbed the losses are all evidence of the defendant's state of mind at the time, and they carry more weight with a jury than anything said after the investigation began.
The counterexamples matter as well. Thirty percent of the trades one adviser assigned to himself had same-day losses. More than four percent of the California adviser's own allocations were unprofitable. The chief investment officer split a large share of his trades evenly between the favored and disfavored strategies, and those trades showed no bias. The government treats these facts as noise around a pattern. The defense treats them as proof that allocation decisions were made for reasons other than the price. Which reading a jury accepts depends on whether the defense has gone through the communications trade by trade and can explain the ones the government chose to feature. In the custodian case, the adviser's answer to the broker's inquiry became a paragraph in the complaint. A documented, contemporaneous explanation given at that moment would have been pleaded the other way.
Insider Witnesses and Cooperators
Statistics do not testify. Between the blotter and the defendant's state of mind stand the people who were there: the trading assistant who took the chief investment officer's allocations by phone, the chief compliance officer who gave the training, the other portfolio manager on the flagship strategy, the trade operations staff who received the confirmations, the employees who uploaded the commodity pool operator's allocation files at his direction, the introducing broker who was told the allocations would be at average price, the co-conspirator abroad, and the custodian employee who made the April 2024 call. Many of them will testify under a cooperation agreement, a non-prosecution agreement, or immunity, and the rest will testify as current or former employees of a firm that has conducted its own investigation, has its own exposure, and has every reason to put distance between itself and the individual.
Cross-examination of these witnesses is the core of a trial defense. It covers the benefit the witness is receiving and what the witness understands he must deliver to earn it. It covers every prior statement, including proffer notes, SEC testimony transcripts, and interview memoranda, and every place those statements have shifted. It covers the witness's own role: the assistant who entered every allocation without objection, the compliance department that received the confirmations daily, saw the time stamps for years, warned about them in 2018, and never required pre-allocation. And it covers the limits of what the witness actually knows, because an assistant who received a phone call at 4 p.m. can say when the call came and cannot say what the defendant was thinking when he placed the trade at 8 a.m. Cross-examination of these witnesses is less often about catching a lie than about establishing the boundary of what each one saw. A defense that has not prepared to try the cooperators has not prepared to try the case, and the government knows it.
What the Firm Knew
The charging documents against the chief investment officer describe a firm that received his trade confirmations throughout the day, tracked daily performance by strategy, trained its managers that regulators look at time stamps, and nonetheless let a portfolio manager phone in his allocations after the close for years. The firm's own disclosures said allocations could differ by strategy. None of that excuses the conduct the government alleges, but it changes the story from a secret scheme to a practice that was visible inside the firm, and willfulness is harder to prove about a practice that was visible. The same facts bear on the negligence claims, on the firm's supervisory exposure, and on the credibility of the firm's employees when they testify about what they knew.
What Comes Next: Why More Cherry-Picking Cases Are Coming
The next cases are more likely to come from data than from client complaints. Every allocation carries a time stamp, every custodian keeps a trade blotter, and an analyst can compare execution time to allocation time and first-day returns across accounts in a matter of days. The SEC built a program around that comparison in 2015 and has refined it since, the 2024 firm-level settlement originated in the Market Abuse Unit's Analysis and Detection Center, and the CFTC receives allocation data from futures commission merchants. When DOJ announced the 2023 plea, it highlighted the Department's commitment to using data analytics in the financial markets.
Custodians are watching allocation timing as well. In the October 2026 SEC case, the custodian's own employee spotted the allocations before any regulator did, and firms that clear for independent advisers will terminate a relationship rather than carry the risk. The Justice Department has also said where it will look. The Criminal Division's May 2025 enforcement memorandum lists fraud that victimizes U.S. investors and crimes involving digital assets among its high-impact areas, directs prosecutors to prioritize individuals, and instructs them to move quickly from investigation to charging decision.
The limitations periods leave room. Criminal securities fraud carries a six-year period, and the SEC can seek disgorgement for scienter-based violations going back ten years under 15 U.S.C. § 78u(d)(8), so a charge filed in 2026 for conduct that ended in 2022 is well within schedule. And the template travels. Discretion, delay, a statistical disparity, a written promise of fair allocation, and a denial appear in every pleading reviewed here, and they fit any adviser with a block account, any futures customer with an allocation portal, and any fund manager with an omnibus account at a prime broker. Firms face their own exposure under Section 206(4) and Rule 206(4)-7 for failing to design and enforce allocation procedures, as the 2024 settlements show.
Defense Counsel in Cherry-Picking Investigations
Armstrong & Bradylyons PLLC defends investment advisers, portfolio managers, commodity pool operators, and trading advisors in cherry-picking investigations before the SEC, the CFTC, and the Justice Department through its securities and commodities fraud defense practice. Scott Armstrong, a former Assistant Chief in the Market Integrity and Major Frauds Unit of DOJ's Fraud Section, supervised the Department's first criminal cherry-picking prosecution of a commodity trading advisor and pool operator involving cryptocurrency futures, the 2023 case described above. Drew Bradylyons, former Chief of the Financial Crimes and Public Corruption Unit at the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Eastern District of Virginia, ran parallel civil and criminal matters with the SEC and CFTC. Both have built cases on cooperating witnesses and have cross-examined them at trial. The firm handles these matters in every federal district.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is cherry-picking in trading, and why is it illegal?
Cherry-picking is the fraudulent allocation of trades after the adviser knows how they performed. The adviser places an order in a block, omnibus, or suspense account, waits to see whether the price moved, and then assigns profitable trades to a favored account and unprofitable trades to other clients. DOJ's 2023 charging document describes it as preferentially misappropriating profitable trades, or failing to allocate unprofitable trades, for the adviser's benefit and at the clients' expense. The favored account can be the adviser's personal account, a related entity, a higher-fee strategy, or a preferred client.
It is illegal because an adviser with discretionary authority is a fiduciary. The SEC treats cherry-picking as a breach of the duty of loyalty under Section 206 of the Advisers Act and as a deceptive scheme under Rule 10b-5. The CFTC treats it as fraud under Sections 4b and 4o of the Commodity Exchange Act and as a violation of Regulation 1.35(b)(5), which requires fair and equitable post-trade allocation of bunched orders. DOJ prosecutes the same conduct as investment adviser fraud, securities fraud, commodities fraud, or conspiracy.
Is cherry-picking trades a federal crime, and what is the prison exposure?
Yes. The Justice Department has charged cherry-picking in 2023, 2024, and 2026. A willful violation of Advisers Act Section 206 is a felony under 15 U.S.C. § 80b-17 with a five-year maximum. Securities fraud under Section 10(b) carries up to 20 years under 15 U.S.C. § 78ff. Commodities fraud and commodity trading advisor fraud carry up to 10 years under 7 U.S.C. § 13(a)(5). Securities and commodities fraud under 18 U.S.C. § 1348 carries up to 25 years. Conspiracy under 18 U.S.C. § 371 and false statements under 18 U.S.C. § 1001 each carry up to five years. Criminal cases also include forfeiture of proceeds and restitution to clients.
In the 2023 cryptocurrency futures case, a guilty plea to a single conspiracy count produced a 24-month prison sentence, $1,208,503 in restitution, and $1,633,119 in forfeiture. Whether a matter stays civil or becomes criminal depends on the size of the disparity, the evidence of intent, the defendant's statements to investigators, and the agency's decision to refer.
How do the SEC and CFTC detect cherry-picking, and what triggers an investigation?
Most investigations start with data rather than a client complaint. The SEC has run a data-driven cherry-picking initiative since 2015 in which enforcement staff and economists from the Division of Economic and Risk Analysis review trade allocation data obtained from custodians. The Market Abuse Unit's Analysis and Detection Center generated the 2024 failure-to-supervise case. The analysis compares first-day returns in the adviser's account against first-day returns in client accounts and calculates the probability that the split occurred by chance. The CFTC obtains allocation files from futures commission merchants and applies the same comparison.
Custodian referrals are the second common trigger. In the October 2026 SEC case, a broker-dealer's own employee flagged allocations submitted after the outcome was known and later terminated the adviser. Firms also refer their own employees, as the chief investment officer's firm did after an internal investigation in October 2023. Examiners review Form ADV allocation disclosures against trading records during routine examinations. Clients rarely detect the conduct themselves, which both SEC complaints cite as the reason the scheme is inherently deceptive.
What does it mean when the SEC or CFTC asks an adviser for trade allocation records or testimony?
A request for allocation records or testimony about allocation practices usually means the agency has already compared execution time stamps to allocation time stamps and has run the first-day return comparison. The questions that follow tend to focus on who made the allocation decisions, when they were made, whether any contemporaneous record of intended allocations exists, and what the adviser's Form ADV, policies, and client agreements say about allocation.
In the October 2026 SEC case, the custodian asked for pre-allocation records before the SEC did, and the adviser's answer that none existed appears in the complaint. In the 2024 case, the chief investment officer's sworn answer to the SEC that he typically had an allocation in mind when placing an order became a false statement count under 18 U.S.C. § 1001. Testimony in an SEC or CFTC investigation is given under oath, is transcribed, and is available to prosecutors. Decisions about whether and how to respond carry consequences in both the civil and criminal tracks.
What is the difference between an SEC cherry-picking case and a criminal cherry-picking prosecution?
The standard of proof, the required mental state, and the remedies. The SEC proves its case by a preponderance of the evidence and can prevail on negligence alone under Section 206(2) of the Advisers Act and Sections 17(a)(2) and (3) of the Securities Act. DOJ must prove willfulness beyond a reasonable doubt. The SEC obtains injunctions, industry bars, disgorgement with prejudgment interest, and civil penalties. DOJ obtains prison sentences, restitution, and forfeiture.
The two tracks run together. The SEC complaint and the criminal indictment against the chief investment officer were filed in the same month. The CFTC complaint against the commodity pool operator preceded the criminal information by five months, and the later consent order incorporated every admission from the plea agreement and credited criminal restitution and forfeiture against the civil obligations. Testimony in the civil matter feeds the criminal case. Both the 2024 indictment and the 2026 information allege false statements to the SEC, and the 2024 indictment charges the SEC testimony as a separate count.
Can the SEC charge a state-registered investment adviser with cherry-picking?
Yes. Section 206 of the Advisers Act applies to any investment adviser as defined in Section 202(a)(11), whether registered with the SEC, registered with a state, or unregistered. The adviser sued in October 2026 was registered with California and Hawaii, managed about $54.6 million for 64 clients, and was not registered with the SEC. The SEC charged him and his firm under Section 17(a), Section 10(b) and Rule 10b-5, and Sections 206(1) and 206(2), imputed his mental state to the firm, and sought disgorgement from both on a joint and several basis along with a bar from association with any broker, dealer, or investment adviser. The Form ADV Part 2A brochure he filed with the state through the Investment Adviser Registration Depository became the basis for the misstatement claims.
Does cherry-picking apply to futures, cryptocurrency, and commodity pools?
Yes. Futures and options on futures are commodity interests under the Commodity Exchange Act, and that includes Treasury futures, equity index futures, foreign exchange futures, and bitcoin and ether futures traded on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. Cherry-picking those instruments violates Section 4b, Section 4o, Section 6(c)(1) and Regulation 180.1, and Regulation 1.35(b)(5). The CFTC treats bitcoin and other digital assets as commodities, so Regulation 180.1 reaches allocation fraud in spot crypto as well.
Registration status does not control. The 2024 indictment charged the chief investment officer of an SEC-registered bond manager as a commodity trading advisor and an associated person of a commodity pool operator because he traded Treasury futures for client portfolios. The 2023 case, described by DOJ as the first criminal cherry-picking charge against a commodity trading advisor and pool operator involving cryptocurrency futures, was resolved by a guilty plea and a CFTC consent order.
What does CFTC Regulation 1.35(b)(5) require for bunched orders and post-trade allocation?
Regulation 1.35(b)(5) permits an eligible account manager, including a registered commodity trading advisor or an SEC-registered investment adviser, to place a single bunched order for multiple accounts and allocate the fills afterward. Allocations must be made as soon as practicable after execution, must be fair and equitable, and must follow a methodology objective and specific enough to permit independent verification by the futures commission merchant and regulators. No account or group of accounts may receive consistently favorable or unfavorable treatment, and the account manager must keep records sufficient to demonstrate compliance.
The September 2025 consent order found a violation of Regulation 1.35(b)(5)(iv)(B) as a standalone count, independent of fraud. Setting up the suspense account to allocate at an average price did not satisfy the rule, because the allocation of profitable and unprofitable contracts was skewed even though every account received the same price per contract. The regulation addresses the pattern of allocations and does not require proof of intent.
What are the defenses to a cherry-picking charge?
The defenses track the government's three sources of proof. First, the statistics. The probability figures in these complaints are the output of a model built on choices about the measurement window, the trades included, the comparison groups, and whether correlated trades are treated as independent events, and each choice can be tested by a defense economist. Legitimate strategy differences, mandates, risk limits, and client instructions can explain allocations the aggregate figures attribute to intent, and the loss and harm calculations that drive sentencing, restitution, and disgorgement rest on the same contestable data.
Second, the contemporaneous record. The government quotes compliance training and policies to prove knowledge. The same emails, allocation instructions, trade tickets, and messages are the primary evidence of good faith, together with the trades the government leaves out, such as the losses the defendant kept in his own account or the trades he split evenly with no bias. Third, the witnesses. Statistics cannot establish what a defendant was thinking, so the government relies on assistants, compliance personnel, co-workers, and sometimes co-conspirators, many of whom testify under cooperation or non-prosecution agreements or on behalf of a firm with its own exposure. Cross-examining those witnesses on their benefits, their prior statements, their own roles, and the limits of what they actually saw is the center of a trial defense. In the SEC's civil case, negligence-based claims under Section 206(2) and Section 17(a)(2) and (3) remain available even where scienter is not proven, which shapes how each defense is deployed.
What penalties and remedies apply in a cherry-picking case?
In an SEC action: a permanent injunction, a conduct-based injunction or bar from the securities industry, disgorgement of all gains with prejudgment interest, tiered civil penalties, and, where registered funds are involved, an officer-and-director bar. The SEC can reach disgorgement for scienter-based violations going back ten years under 15 U.S.C. § 78u(d)(8). In a CFTC action: a permanent injunction, a trading ban, a permanent registration bar, restitution to customers, disgorgement, and civil monetary penalties. The 2025 consent order imposed a six-year ban on trading commodity interests and digital asset commodities for the defendants' own accounts and a permanent bar on managing anyone else's.
In a criminal case: imprisonment, supervised release, restitution, and forfeiture of proceeds, with substitute assets available when the proceeds cannot be located. Advisory firms face censure, penalties, and compliance undertakings for failing to supervise, as the two firms that paid $200,000 each in September 2024 did.
Do unrealized first-day gains count as cherry-picking?
Yes. The SEC acknowledged that the chief investment officer's first-day gains were primarily unrealized and pleaded the scheme anyway. The government measures first-day performance because that is the window in which the adviser had information the clients did not. A position that starts the day with a gain is more likely to end profitable, and the flagship strategy's 34 consecutive months of net first-day gains improved its reported performance regardless of how individual positions closed.
The harm theory does not require that clients lose money overall. It requires that clients be deprived of a fair share of the opportunity. The 2023 commodity pool case pleaded the loss as the pools' deprivation of a proportional share of trading profits and their absorption of a disproportionate share of losses.
Can an advisory firm or its principals be liable for an employee's cherry-picking?
Yes. In September 2024 the SEC settled with two advisory firms over the multi-year cherry-picking of two representatives. The order found that the firms failed reasonably to supervise within the meaning of Section 203(e)(6) of the Advisers Act, failed to adopt and implement policies and procedures reasonably designed to prevent unfair trade allocations under Section 206(4) and Rule 206(4)-7, violated Section 206(2), and published misleading Forms ADV. Each firm accepted a censure, a cease-and-desist order, and a $200,000 penalty.
Under the Commodity Exchange Act, a firm is liable for its agent's violations under Section 2(a)(1)(B) and Regulation 1.2, and a controlling person who fails to act in good faith is liable for the firm's violations under Section 13(b). The chief investment officer's firm opened an internal investigation, removed his allocation authority, placed him on leave, and closed the strategy. How a firm responds once it learns of the conduct has a direct bearing on its own exposure.
What happens when a custodian or broker terminates an adviser over trade allocation concerns?
The termination becomes part of the government's case. Broker-dealers and futures commission merchants have independent reporting obligations under the Bank Secrecy Act, and a termination for trading concerns is often followed by a regulatory inquiry. In the October 2026 SEC case, the custodian's employee called the adviser, described preferential allocations made after the outcome was known, and asked for records showing allocations recorded in advance. The adviser had none and continued allocating the same way for the rest of the month. The custodian then terminated the relationship in writing, citing concerns with trading, and set a 90-day transition.
What the adviser told his clients next became a separate allegation. His email attributing the move to poor service and a mutually agreed transition was pleaded as a lulling misstatement, a breach of the duty of loyalty, and proof of scienter.
How long after the conduct can the SEC, CFTC, or DOJ bring a cherry-picking case?
For criminal securities fraud offenses, including violations of 18 U.S.C. § 1348, Section 10(b), and Advisers Act Section 206, and conspiracies to commit them, six years under 18 U.S.C. § 3301. For Commodity Exchange Act offenses and false statements, the general five-year period under 18 U.S.C. § 3282. For SEC civil penalties, five years under 28 U.S.C. § 2462. For SEC disgorgement, ten years for scienter-based violations and five years for others under 15 U.S.C. § 78u(d)(8), and ten years for injunctions and bars. For CFTC civil penalties, five years under 28 U.S.C. § 2462.
The September 2026 information illustrates the lag. The conduct ran from 2015 through August 2022, the SEC settled with the adviser's former firms in September 2024, and the criminal charge was filed in September 2026.
Who defends investment advisers and fund managers in cherry-picking investigations?
Armstrong & Bradylyons PLLC represents investment advisers, portfolio managers, commodity pool operators, and trading advisors in SEC, CFTC, and criminal cherry-picking matters through its securities and commodities fraud defense practice. Scott Armstrong supervised the Justice Department's first criminal cherry-picking prosecution of a commodity trading advisor and commodity pool operator, a case involving cryptocurrency and foreign exchange futures, during his service as an Assistant Chief in the Market Integrity and Major Frauds Unit of DOJ's Fraud Section. That case produced a guilty plea to conspiracy to commit commodities fraud, a 24-month sentence, and a parallel CFTC consent order with restitution and disgorgement. He also served as co-lead trial counsel in the nation's leading market manipulation case against two senior bank traders for spoofing precious metals futures and was lead trial counsel in the first cryptocurrency market manipulation case charged under Title 15.
Drew Bradylyons served as Chief of the Financial Crimes and Public Corruption Unit at the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Eastern District of Virginia, where he supervised parallel civil, criminal, and administrative fraud matters and partnered with the SEC and CFTC on enforcement. At DOJ's Fraud Section he prosecuted a first-of-its-kind commodities insider trading ring in natural gas futures. The firm's attorneys have tried 25 federal jury trials, have built cases on cooperating witnesses and cross-examined them, and handle these matters in every federal district.
Facing a Cherry-Picking or Trade Allocation Investigation?
Armstrong & Bradylyons PLLC defends investment advisers, portfolio managers, commodity pool operators, and trading advisors in SEC and CFTC enforcement actions and parallel criminal investigations nationwide. As former DOJ Fraud Section prosecutors and senior DOJ supervisors, Scott Armstrong and Drew Bradylyons built and supervised the trade allocation, commodities, and crypto fraud cases the government brings today.
