The traders spent $12 million on option contracts and turned that into more than $100 million - a return of more than 900%. Susquehanna, the firm on the other side of those bets, says it lost more than $70 million. Now it wants to find out who those traders are.
A put option is a contract that pays off when a stock's price falls. The traders bought 200,000 short-dated put options - meaning the contracts expired quickly - in the two weeks before a big Chinese government announcement. They spent $12 million. After the announcement, their options were worth more than $100 million.
Susquehanna claims the timing and scale of the trades strongly suggest the traders had access to confidential data before it was released. For comparison, the firm noted in its complaint that "Raj Rajaratnam's infamous insider trading scheme at Galleon Management yielded only approximately $53 million in profits."
On May 22, 2026, the Chinese government announced it would punish brokerages it accused of moving money illegally from mainland China to foreign markets. Two firms were singled out: Futu Holdings Ltd. and Up Fintech Holding Ltd., better known as Tiger Brokers. The government said they were operating in China without a license.
Their stock prices dropped sharply. The traders had already bought put options betting on that very decline. Susquehanna believes the traders learned about the crackdown before it became public. The suspect trades were executed through Interactive Brokers Group Inc., and also directly at Futu and Tiger themselves.
Susquehanna filed its lawsuit in Manhattan federal court. It is asking the judge to freeze accounts at Interactive Brokers, Futu, and Tiger that are linked to the suspect trades. It also wants permission to send subpoenas to those brokerages to get the account holders' names.
Right now, the defendants are listed as "100 John Does" - unknown individuals. Susquehanna is trying to turn those unknown names into real people. The case is pending.
Officials at Tiger, Futu, and Interactive Brokers did not reply to requests for comment. Susquehanna chose not to comment on the lawsuit.
Susquehanna is one of the largest market makers in options trading, regularly serving as the counterparty when investors buy or sell contracts. In this case, the firm says it was on the losing end of a highly unusual surge in put option purchases on Futu and Tiger stocks just before the government announcement. The trades involved a concentrated volume of short-dated puts, a pattern Susquehanna argues is statistically improbable without advance knowledge. The firm's complaint also highlights that the roughly 900% return dwarfs typical profitable trades and resembles the kind of outsized gains seen in previous insider trading cases, such as the Rajaratnam scheme mentioned in the lawsuit.
