Jonathan Lebed

Jonathan G. Lebed (born September 29, 1984) is an American stock trader prosecuted by the SEC at age 15 for stock manipulation.

In 2010, he was living in Wayne, New Jersey and the sole owner of Lebed Biz LLC, which runs a website touting penny stocks. In 2008, a company won a $2.56 million judgment against Lebed.

Lebed was raised in Cedar Grove, New Jersey, attended Cedar Grove High School and did not attend college.

Lebed was the first minor prosecuted by the SEC. Between September 1999 and February 2000, Lebed made hundreds of thousands of dollars from the computer in his bedroom in Cedar Grove, New Jersey by posting in Internet chat rooms and on message boards encouraging people to buy penny stocks he already owned, thus, according to the SEC, artificially raising the price of the stock. Between September 1999 and February 2000, his smallest one-day gain was $12,000 while his biggest was $74,000. The SEC, under Arthur Levitt, prosecuted him. In 2001, Lebed and the SEC negotiated an out-of-court settlement in which Lebed forfeited $285,000 in profit and interest he had made on 11 trades without admitting any wrongdoing — allowing him to keep close to half a million dollars.

Lebed's legal issues were profiled in an episode of the 2001 BBC documentary The Future Just Happened.

In 2003, he ran for Cedar Grove township council and lost.