Offenses committed against investors and financial markets themselves, through deceiving people who buy or hold a security, commodity or other financial instrument, or through manipulating the market's own price-discovery process rather than any single victim's individual transaction. This group gathers offenses trading on non-public information or false public statements, such as insider trading and pump-and-dump schemes; investment schemes that pay early participants from later participants' own money, such as a Ponzi or pyramid scheme; and trading-venue manipulation techniques, including spoofing, wash trading, front running, churning, naked short selling, cornering the market, layering, options backdating, late trading, mismarking and the operation of an illegal bucket shop. It excludes fraud committed inside a company's own books against its own shareholders or regulators, which belongs under Corporate, Accounting and Occupational Fraud, and excludes an individual consumer's investment loss to an ordinary confidence scheme not built around a security or trading venue, which belongs under Consumer, Retail and Confidence Fraud.