For example, shortly after 2:07 pm on November 5, 2002, a specialist at FSI engaged in an unlawful interpositioning transaction in the stock of Johnson & Johnson ("JNJ"). As depicted below (see white box, bottom center of screen), at exactly 2:07:00 pm, the Display Book for the FSI specialist showed, among other things, one market order to buy 1,300 JNJ shares and two market orders to sell a total of 3,400 JNJ shares (one for 1,900 and one for 1,500). At that very moment, the Display Book highlighted the market orders in yellow at the bottom middle of the screen as "13 MKT 34" - meaning 1,300 shares to buy at market and 3,400 shares to sell at market (see also "15, 19" to the right of that, indicating the two market sell orders):
Display Book for the FSI specialist
The FSI specialist should have paired the 1,300 share buy order with the 1,500 share sell order, and could have satisfied the remaining 200 shares of that sell order through a proprietary trade. Instead, at 2:07:02, the specialist stepped in front of the 1,300 share buy order and bought all 3,400 shares of both sell orders through a proprietary trade at $59.42 per share. Next, FSI's specialist raised the price to $59.46 and, in a separate trade reported at 2:07:05, sold 800 shares from the firm's dealer account to fill a portion of the 1,300 share market buy order he had traded in front of in the immediately preceding transaction. By selling, at $59.46, the 800 JNJ shares he had purchased just moments earlier at $59.42, the FSI specialist made a profit of $32 for FSI's dealer account (800 shares x $.04/share = $32) through a riskless transaction.