It is not illegal to trade on material, non-public information if it is not acquired from an insider with a confidentiality agreement and you don’t have such an

It is not illegal to trade on material, non-public information if it is not acquired from an insider with a confidentiality agreement and you don’t have such an agreement either. I used to find, collect and analyze supply chain data to sell exceptionally accurate earnings forecasts to a variety of funds. In every case I can recall, the analysts at these funds were extremely careful to make sure the data was legally sourced. In one particular case, a competing firm became a bit overeager and used data that broke the terms of service of a company’s website - in doing so, they threw each fund they sold the forecast to into a compliance-mandated trading lockdown on corresponding equities and derivative securities once they disclosed to the funds that they overstepped. People have a lot of misconceived ideas about what constitutes insider trading. Information asymmetry does not constitute insider trading. In fact, it would be virtually impossible to yield a positive return in trading were it not for information asymmetry. This is fundamentally why research departments exist.