Founder

Daniel M. Hawke

Founder and Chief Executive Officer

Daniel M. Hawke founded TRADEcognition™ after a 37-year legal career, including 26 years in securities enforcement and defense. He has handled trading cases from both sides: as the regulator who built them and as the defense lawyer who answered them.

He served 16 years at the SEC, including more than a decade as a senior officer in the Division of Enforcement. From 2010 to 2015 he was the first Chief of the Market Abuse Unit. He supervised enforcement actions involving organized insider trading, layering and spoofing, market access, cross-market manipulation, and violations of Regulation NMS, Regulation ATS and Regulation SHO.

Under his leadership, the Market Abuse Unit built its own trading surveillance technology and applied quantitative methods to detect abusive trading, pioneering trader-based investigations. He created the unit’s Analysis and Detection Center.

From 2006 to 2014 he was Director of the SEC’s Philadelphia Regional Office.

After leaving the SEC in 2015, he spent eleven years at Arnold & Porter, as a partner and later senior counsel, representing broker-dealers, investment advisers, hedge funds, proprietary trading firms, alternative trading systems, national securities exchanges, public companies and individuals in SEC and FINRA investigations and examinations, on matters including market manipulation, best execution, insider trading, MNPI controls and data vendor diligence.

Over his career he has worked on thousands of trading-related compliance issues and enforcement matters, including market manipulation, insider trading, best execution and the controls that govern material nonpublic information.

He began his career in private practice at Tucker, Flyer & Lewis, where he became a partner. He has published in Law360 and Corporate Counsel, and serves as a Trustee of the SEC Historical Society.