[c7b]

Exactly, shameful framing. But it should be noted that he veered onto the clearly wrong path even sooner than you suggest: by taking user deposits and putting them into anything other than what the users had instructed them to hold with it. In regulated stock brokers, the stocks that are held on behalf of users are put into segregated accounts, meaning that they belong to users even if the broker becomes insolvent. By breaking this 1:1 link between users' funds and the corresponding assets, he's already creating mayhem, even if the investments had turned out to be successful. A broker simply has no business whatsoever to speculate with users' funds.