You could set up a plausible history ahead of time by doing innocent TSLA trades. Maybe establish a pattern of regularly scheduled trades. And then it just so happens that the fake tweet comes out right around when your scheduled trade was going to execute.
Not to mention that this requires a lot of upfront time and capital and depends on no circuit breaker being pulled, which would be quite likely giving the high amount of damage and blatant market manipulation.
"Signs of progress toward a coronavirus vaccine by Moderna propelled most corners of the stock market higher. … Most of the gains followed the release of a new study suggesting Moderna had reached a breakthrough with its coronavirus vaccine, setting the stage for a larger trial at the end of this month. Cruise-ship operators, airliners and other stocks sensitive to the coronavirus crisis led the stock market higher. Shares of Moderna rose $5.18, or 6.9%, to $80.22.
Royal Caribbean Cruises Ltd. was up 21.2%. Norwegian Cruise Line Holdings Ltd. was up 20.7%. Carnival Corp. was up 16.2%. American Airlines Group Inc. was also up 16.2%. United Airlines Holdings was up 14.6%. The biggest gainers were the vaccine-sensitive industries, not Moderna itself."
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-07-16/a-vacc...
These arguments all seem to be operating on the assumption that there would be a large number of day/swing traders who would exit their positions with perfect timing, but this is unlikely because they wouldn't have the knowledge that the price move was ephemeral and driven by a false rumor. The number of people who made a half million off it would be a lot smaller than you think.
I mean, yeah, there might be a ten or hundred people who match this criteria, but market manipulation is a very serious crime and when people lost many millions, the SEC is going to pour a lot of resources into checking everyone.
EDIT: This is also assuming the hacker is American. I bet you a lot that this matches very few people in, for example, India.
I have heard of drug busts that began with detectives going to a university in a town where the drugs (think synthesized drugs) seem to be originating from. Cross-reference all students on financial aid with all students that had taken Organic Chemistry 300. You could count the number on one hand.
Each were watched, one was seen making the handoff....
Will they go to those same lengths to find people who profit a few hundred grand or a mil on the stock market, when the consequences of what we're talking about could result in tens or hundreds of millions of dollars of profit/loss?
There aren’t that many individual investors with short positions that large.
People with enough money to be investing regularly also probably don't need to orchestrate elaborate smash-and-grab cybercons to make money. People in such a position would already be doing fine and would have the added bonus of never fearing going to jail. I suspect whoever did this likely doesn't have much fiat money, or if they do, it's probably mostly dirty money which wouldn't be feasible to invest with.
Here, there's no risk/reward trade-off like there would be from shorting. It's a much more scalable attack: every additional hijacking results in additional expected value, but no additional risk. With some form of stock betting, the more you scale it up (in terms of reward potential), the more the activity would stand out.
I think the attackers made the smartest possible decision, given what they had/could do, if their goal was purely total profit (plus not getting caught). If their primary goal wasn't money, then it's certainly a squandered opportunity, but most criminals are just in it for the money.
Watch stock go up, sell before the whole thing is clarified.
Here's a scenario demonstrating the idea:
Let's say I spend $92,300 to buy 61 shares of TSLA at its current price of $1,512.18. Then I post my Tweet causing TSLA to jump to $1600.00 on the same day and sell my 61 for $97,600. My total profit is only $5,300.
But what if instead I buy $92,300 of 7/17 TSLA call options at $1600? They cost only $9.23 per contract for 10,000 contracts. Now the same price movement to $1,600.00 today causes the value of my options to increase to $39.16 per contact. I can sell them for $391,600 netting me a total of $299,300 for the same starting capital. If you have access to margin then you're talking millions in profit with even a small price movement (though at that point you probably have to start worrying about the SEC).
In general though I agree with you - I think a person absolutely could make more than $100k on the market with not a lot of capital and get away with it.
Of course, "not a lot of capital" is still more than no capital.
The only time where the SEC has a really easy chance of catching you is with very out of the money puts purchased only days before the attack. The volume is much lower there and that's a much more common way to make money on this stuff (since with put options you don't need to short massive amounts of the stock).