white men with money and gatorade

Morgan Stanley Trader Under Investigation for Gatorade-Fueled Market Manipulation

The culprit? Photo: Gatorade

Once upon a time, Glenn Hadden was an ordinary Wall Street bond trader who spent his humble days buying and selling interest rate futures from his desk at Goldman Sachs.

Then, one day, he got word that a new tool of the trade was making the rounds — a performance-enhancing drink that turned normal traders into sleep-defying, market-timing revenue machines. One sip of this beverage could take a first-year analyst and turn him, in an instant, into a genius to rival Ray Dalio.

Its name: Gatorade.

Hadden drank and drank, and pretty soon he was a killer trader — the Rambo of Rates, if you will. He earned something like $10 million a year, was made a Goldman partner, and struck fear into the hearts of his fellow traders:

Current and former colleagues said Mr. Hadden, who has been known to drink copious amounts of Gatorade at work, was almost “machinelike” when he traded. “He gets this look in his eye,” one former colleague said. “It is scary.”

In fact, he may have gotten too good. DealBook’s Susanne Craig reports that Hadden eventually attracted the suspicion of the New York Fed, which began investigating him for potential market manipulation. After being put on leave at Goldman, he jumped over to Morgan Stanley, where he became the head of the global interest rates desk. And now, according to a regulatory filing, he is being investigated for his trades while at Goldman, which regulators suspect may not have been on the up-and-up:

Specifically, regulators at the CME Group, which runs commodity and futures exchanges, are investigating whether Mr. Hadden’s purchases or sales of Treasury futures late in the trading day manipulated closing prices in the market and, in turn, made other of his trades more profitable, according to people briefed on the matter who were not authorized to speak publicly.

Hadden is still employed at Morgan Stanley, but he could “face millions in fines and be barred from trading on the CME Group” if the investigation turns up evidence of wrongdoing.

Hadden is Canadian and obviously too polite to engage in any illicit behavior on his own. So clearly this is the Gatorade’s fault. But aspiring trading gods need to know: Which flavor (allegedly) turned Hadden to the dark side? Lemon-lime? Orange? One of those gross Gatorade Rain things they used to sell?

Morgan Stanley Trader Under Investigation