Bernard Lawrence Madoff founded Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities LLC, a
small Wall Street investment firm in 1960. The firm was initially a small penny stock
trader but it grew fast due to its use of innovative computer technology. The firm
became one of the largest market makers in the US, and by 2008, the year of B.L.
Madoff’s arrest, Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities LLC was the sixth largest
market maker on Wall Street [1].
One division of the company was the ”advisory and investment management
division”, where investors could put their money in a hedge fund. Over the years this
“hedge fund” continued to deliver an almost constant return to the investors on just
above ten percent. This is a very high return given over a long period of time, which
made people concerned. Madoff himself explained to The Wall Street Journal in 1992
[2] that there was nothing special with the high returns, and referred to the high