Capabilities / Market Integrity & Compliance
Is a flagged anomaly real, or an error caused by the data or analysis?
For platforms, risk teams and compliance functions with a surveillance flag, an unusual-activity question, or a market-data quality concern. MSR Decode independently reconstructs the underlying activity to test whether a flag reflects real trading behavior or an artifact of the pipeline that produced it.
Maker-side fills silently omitted → apparent phantom positions
Fills re-fetched without the default → every flagged redemption reconciled
An API default, not a trading anomaly. Read the case →
Contents
Who this is for
Platforms and marketplaces with listing or integrity duties; risk and compliance teams validating a surveillance flag; teams evaluating whether displayed market data faithfully describes underlying activity.
Typical questions
- Is an existing surveillance flag or anomaly real, or an error caused by the data or analysis that produced it?
- Did unusual trading precede a public announcement or resolution event?
- Is a market's displayed volume generated by independent directional participation, or by repeated complementary trading between the same counterparties at minimal net cost?
- How did a contract's settlement design affect participant incentives?
- What would a scheduled review of an agreed set of markets or accounts actually catch?
Evidence MSR can examine
- Flagged trades, the control logic that flagged them, and an independent reconstruction of the same activity.
- On-chain settlement events and contract terms, tested against the market's own published rules.
- Order-level fills and timing, tested against public information and liquidity conditions.
- Raw venue API responses, cross-checked against the underlying chain.
Analytical methods
The same disclosed, ten-step standard used throughout MSR's public research; see the full methodology. Independent reconstruction first tests whether the flagging pipeline itself caused an anomaly. A recurring review is a scheduled review of an agreed set of markets or accounts, not continuous real-time monitoring.
Possible deliverables
Scope determines which of these ship for a given engagement.
- Executive finding — a clear answer to the bounded question.
- Timeline — trading activity against relevant external events.
- Source schedule — records, URLs, APIs, datasets and provenance.
- Technical workpaper — methods, assumptions, limitations and reproduction material.
- Documented review trail — for a recurring-review engagement, a dated record of what was checked and when.
Example investigation
Scope boundaries
MSR performs defined forensic reviews and recurring human-led analysis on a specific question or agreed set of markets or accounts. It is not offered as an enterprise trade-surveillance software platform, and MSR cannot certify a control's overall effectiveness from one sample. A negative or insufficient-evidence finding is a valid outcome; see the independence policy.
Discuss a matter
MSR reviews the question, available records, scope and appropriate work product before accepting an engagement.