Long Island hedge-fund manager Howard Brett Berger has
agreed to fork over more than $6.8 million to settle regulatory charges he
stuck investors with losing trades — while transferring the proceeds from
winning trades into his wife’s account according to a NY Post report.
Berger performed the financial sleight-of-hand while running
the Professional Offshore Opportunity Fund, or POOF, and a second fund,
according to the charges filed by the Securities and Exchange Commission. The 41-year-old money man used an elaborate
“cherry-picking” scheme while day trading to cheat investors, the SEC said.
Berger “utilized a direct-access trading platform to delay
final allocation of the trades until the end of the day, frequently after the
market close, so he could determine whether the trades were profitable,’’ the
court papers say. The trading platform
Meeting Street allowed Berger to make market exchanges and place buy orders
into a second fund’s “allocation’’ or “suspension’’ account.
The SEC concluded he put “most of the unprofitable trades
into the POOF account and left many of the profitable trades in the second
account…
No comments:
Post a Comment