CFTC Fines Sidney Lebental $200,000 for Treasury Spoofing

The Commodity Futures Trading Commission ordered New York trader Sidney Lebental to pay a $200,000 civil penalty and barred him from trading commodity interests for 30 days after finding he placed roughly 50 deceptive orders on the Chicago Board of Trade in 2019.

Under the settled order, Lebental neither admitted nor denied the agency’s findings. The order identifies the spoofing as occurring between January and September 2019 and says the activity primarily involved Ultra U.S. Treasury Bond futures, contracts tied to 25- to 30-year U.S. government debt.

The order describes Lebental placing genuine orders for cash Treasuries or a single futures contract while simultaneously entering larger, deceptive orders on the opposite side in a correlated futures contract. Once the genuine orders filled, he canceled the larger orders. The agency found the instruments were correlated enough that the deceptive orders affected prices.

In addition to the $200,000 civil penalty and the 30-day trading bar, the settlement includes standard public-statement restrictions, a prohibition on further violations of the Commodity Exchange Act’s spoofing ban, and a direction that registered entities deny Lebental trading privileges during the suspension.

The order notes Lebental served as head of the linear rates desk at a global bank during the period covered and that his prior employment included Bank of America Securities. The matter has drawn parallel regulatory attention: FINRA cited him over hundreds of suspect Treasury orders before a 2024 settlement, and Bank of America paid a $24 million FINRA fine in late 2023 related to spoofing on its desk.

Spoofing involves placing orders to create a false impression of demand or supply and then canceling those orders before execution. The CFTC’s order is now part of the public record while leaving the factual findings unadmitted by Lebental under the terms of the settlement.