Jane Street’s alleged manipulation of Indian stock markets has triggered alarm across financial circles. In this searing exclusive interview with The Federal, whistleblower Mayank Bansal details how the US-based trading firm engineered daily distortions of India’s derivatives and cash markets to book abnormal profits amounting to 22,500–25,000 crore.
Bansal lays bare how the scam operated, why it went undetected, and what India must do next.
What first raised your suspicion about Jane Street’s trades?
It wasn’t one day—it was every day. From June or July 2023, a pattern tied to implied volatility kept showing up. That’s a measure of option pricing—how cheap or expensive they are. The manipulation worked like this: take massive derivative positions, then manipulate the underlying cash market to profit off them. Our derivatives market is deep and liquid, but the cash market is shallower. Once these positions were set, the market could be moved heavily to generate profits.
How exactly was this manipulation structured?
There were two main strategies—quiet expiry and violent expiry. In a quiet expiry, they would sell a huge number of options to drive their prices to absurdly low levels—options were dirt cheap. Then, they’d ensure the market didn’t move, so those short positions remained profitable. No matter the news—...
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