A Reckoning for Anthony Davian

Anthony Davian, a once-prolific social media presence who held himself out as an iconoclastic and wildly profitable hedge fund manager before a Southern Investigative Reporting Foundation article last July raised doubts about these claims, was sentenced several hours ago in a Cleveland courtroom to four years and nine months in federal prison. (On August 13, the Department of Justice filed Davian’s guilty plea. That same day, the Securities and Exchange Commission sued Davian and his fund, Davian Capital Advisors.)

Federal Judge Patricia Gaughan of Ohio’s Northern District Court also ordered Davian to make restitution of approximately $1.8 million to his defrauded investors and serve three years of probation after his release. Should Davian waive his right to appeal, he is slated to report to prison in late December or early January, pending his recovery from a recent foot surgery.

According to a pre-sentencing guideline that federal prosecutors filed on November 18, they sought a 60-month sentence (and full restitution) for Davian based on their allegation that Davian never sought to manage money but only to raise investor capital to fund personal and business expenses, including paying off an office lease and attorney fees.

A once-forceful presence on Twitter’s community of investors and traders, now informally known as “FinTwit,” Davian’s signature remark was “Ching!” after a trade he had been discussing allegedly turned profitable.

In the weeks after the Southern Investigative Reporting Foundation’s article was published, the Department of Justice sought to seize Davian’s assets. Apart from an expensive Audi and a Bath, Ohio, property where Davian sought to build a mansion, government lawyers had little to seize.

In the courtroom, according to notes given to the Southern Investigative Reporting Foundation by someone present in the courtroom who asked not to be identified because he sought “to put this behind me,” Davian’s wife and mother made statements that sought mercy from Judge Gaughan before the sentence was entered. His mother discussed what she argued was Davian’s long history of mental illness; his wife said that all of their children had substantive medical issues that were “drowning them in medical expenses.”

According to a colleague answering his phone, Davian’s attorney, Paul Adamson of Akron’s Burdon & Merlitti, could not comment to the Southern Investigative Reporting Foundation before this article’s publication.

Editor’s note: After publication, the article’s headline was changed for brevity, fairness, and accuracy. Links were updated, and presentation and stylistic corrections were made in response to pagination and formatting problems that emerged during a change in content management systems.