The Sure Thing · The Australian Financial Review

Ep 1. Friday Special

February 21, 2021·29 min·2 clips

Police banged on Christopher Hill's door at 5am, launching Australia's biggest insider trading case.

1. 'The Sure Thing' is an Australian Financial Review podcast investigating Australia's biggest insider trading case, presented by investigative reporter Angus Grigg. 2. The two central figures are Christopher Hill, a 24-year-old data analyst at the Australian Bureau of Statistics in Canberra, and Lucas Kamei, a 26-year-old NAB currency trader in Melbourne earning $200,000 a year. 3. The episode's central question is how two university friends from Monash — both without criminal records — devised and executed a scheme that regulators had never seen before, anywhere in the world. 4. The scheme exploited the fact that ABS macro data (employment, construction, inflation) moves the Australian dollar predictably: if the data beats market expectations the dollar rises; if it misses, it falls. 5. Hill helped compile ABS employment figures and, after Kamei's suggestion at a Mornington Peninsula beach party in 2013, began writing headline numbers on a piece of paper and slipping them into his pocket to pass to Kamei days before official release. 6. Kamei placed trades through retail forex broker Pepperstone, which allows ordinary investors to participate in currency markets; the $463 billion traded daily in that market made small individual trades effectively invisible. 7. Their plan was deliberately modest: use $10,000 in seed money, stay under $200,000 total profit, declare everything to the ATO, pocket $50,000 each after tax, and stop. 8. AFR markets editor Vesna Polyak explains the mechanism plainly: trading on ABS data is 'like knowing the dealer's hand in blackjack' — no complex analysis required, just buy or sell the Australian dollar and wait for the release. 9. Professor Clinton Free from Sydney University, a Rhodes Scholar with a PhD from Oxford who studies white-collar crime, describes the scheme as 'an incredibly executed plan' — one that might have succeeded absent a few specific failures. 10. On September 12, 2013, Kamei made his first trade 30 seconds before the ABS labour force figures dropped, closing the position 27 seconds after release for a profit of $13,508 — all from a toilet cubicle at NAB's Melbourne office. 11. Hill describes the feeling of the first successful trade as like starting a small business — something working exactly as planned. 12. Behavioural scientist Juliet Tobias Webb, who holds a PhD in experimental psychology from Cambridge, explains that underdeveloped judgment and higher risk tolerance in young men partly accounts for how little thought the pair gave to consequences. 13. ASIC senior investigator Raymond Washall, with over 20 years at the regulator, describes the Kamei-Hill matter as 'one of the highlights' of his career; federal agent Dean Whelans, who came off a Homicide Squad secondment, admits he initially knew nothing about insider trading. 14. Whelans says he underestimated the pair's tradecraft — particularly their disciplined use of covert phones — and that the investigation felt 'almost impossible' at points. 15. The episode establishes that this is the only known case globally of government economic statistics being used to trade a foreign exchange market. 16. Hill's account of removing the data is striking in its simplicity: he wrote the numbers on a piece of paper, put it in his pocket, and was never checked at the door. 17. What Hill did not know was that Kamei secretly opened a shadow account alongside the agreed Pepperstone account, eventually turning the $10,000 of seed money into $7.8 million over nine months without disclosing this to Hill. 18. Grigg delivers the episode in a mix of archive news audio, present-day interview reconstructions, and expert commentary from Polyak, Free, and the investigators, with a cinematic opening dawn-raid sequence. 19. True-crime fans who enjoy financial crime with a strong character study will find the pacing and detail compelling. 20. Listeners seeking a deep technical treatment of foreign exchange markets or legal proceedings will find the episode skews toward narrative over technical depth.

As heard by us

A dawn raid turns a weekend friendship into a careful insider-trading story.

This opens with a dawn raid and keeps tightening the screw, moving from a hungover data analyst in Canberra to a Melbourne apartment and an old university circle, until a weekend that looks casual starts to feel like an insider-trading case.

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Why you'd press play

For a hard, clean look at how confidential government data became private advantage.

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