Whoa... Sand Hill Exchange never tried to make any money off the site. We did let people put their own money on the line.
You should probably correct your own announcement, then, since you say "when we pushed aggressively to monetize we received a cease and desist from the SEC".
Allowing people to use their own money without trying to keep any of it isn't "monetizing" as that term is usually used of a service.
> We created bots to trade against incoming orders. They were like my friends. I even named them! My favorite was the “Jesse Livermore” bot. Opportunistic to a fault.
> The bots would run every day and place orders against each other so the market looked like it was exhibiting lots of price movement and volume. For added credibility, we randomly generated trading histories for each company going all the way back to last year. So we had historical price and volume in addition to streaming quotes for chart data.
and by then letting people speculatively place their own money into the already unbalanced and illegal equation, you somehow managed to wipe your hands of any responsibility for their actions?
What in god's name are you smoking? You got off easy with a 20k fine. You belong in prison.
In fact, its amazing they continue to run the site, even without accepting money, creating 'fake' data and fake investors to show fake growth of something tied to a real security (you can still trade private stock), is inviting a shit tonne of legal hassles.
"Oh hey, here's a list of private startup stock I own, can you please create some fake data to show a huge interest on your site so I can drive the private sale price and generate some sales?"