10 ms·

Former Equifax Executive Charged with Insider Trading

413 points by carbocation 9y ago

tantalor 9y ago
Insider trading is not a crime, per se
- teej 9y ago
  He was charged with illegal insider trading. It turns out that is in fact a crime. > Defendant Jun Ying (“Ying”) committed securities fraud by engaging in illegal insider trading. After being entrusted with material, nonpublic information about a massive cyber-intrusion and data breach suffered by his employer, Equifax Inc. (“Equifax” or “the company”), Ying exercised all his vested Equifax stock options and sold the shares prior to the public announcement of the breach. By selling when he did, Ying avoided losses in excess of $117,000.
  - zwily 9y ago
    I just listened to a podcast today about insider trading... and apparently, there’s not actually a law against insider trading itself. Technically what you get prosecuted for is stealing information, or something like that. Obviously there is tons of case law to support the illegality of insider trading, but you can’t find an actual law that says “you will go to jail if you do insider trading”.
    - chc 9y ago
      I'm pretty sure SEC Rule 10b-5[1] covers insider trading, along with various supplementary rules. [1]: https://www.ecfr.gov/cgi-bin/retrieveECFR?gp=&SID=3d58bfb5f19c9ad7e1c1c20032a314df&mc=true&r=SECTION&n=se17.4.240_110b_65 https://www.ecfr.gov/cgi-bin/retrieveECFR?gp=&SID=3d58bfb5f1...
      - tanderson92 9y ago
        Technically, a Rule is not a Law.
    - sokoloff 9y ago
      There are anti-fraud provisions in securities law; insider trading is prosecuted as a form of fraud.
      - fludlight 9y ago
        This methodology is not uncommon. Mail fraud and bribery of foreign officials are prosecuted as "depriving the public of honest services".
- unreal37 9y ago
  Apparently, though, he was not specifically told that Equifax had a data breach. He guessed they did based on a project he was being asked to drop everything and help out with. It'll be an interesting case if he pleads not guilty.
  - oh_sigh 9y ago
    Yeah, I hope he fights the charges just so I can selfishly see how it plays out. It seems there is a strong paper trail of execs intentionally keeping ying out of the loop. If that's the case, and he figures out that everyone is just acting weird, it doesn't seem so straight forward that he was trading with material information. If I work at Amazon as a lowly sde and see Jeff bezos fuming in a conference room with the chief privacy and security officers, and I assume Amazon had a data breach and sell my stock, did I insider trade?
    - unclebucknasty 9y ago
      It's an interesting question, as even with the insight that everyone is "acting weird", he would have still been trading with more info than the average investor. OTOH, many execs would be privy to more info than the average investor as a matter of course, and we certainly don't prohibit them from trading. So, where is the line drawn?
    - billylindeman 9y ago
      i'd be very interested in knowing that as well. doesn't seem like it'd be material information
  - chris_wot 9y ago
    If he guessed based on being told to drop everything... then he still knew there was something seriously wrong before everyone else. That's insider trading.
    - mulmen 9y ago
      But is it illegal insider trading? This is an honest question.
taspeotis 9y ago
Related reading: https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-03-15/is-insider-guessing-illegal https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-03-15/is-inside...
- jnordwick 9y ago
  Matt Levine, always interesting. Not related, but required to fully underarms how different this case is. Defendant wasnt given insider information, and prosecution accepts this as true. He kept being told he was doing a project for another company, but he slowly figured out that was fabricated story and correctly deduced it was for his own, Equifax. This is such a borderline and interesting case. I would definitely have preferred a not guilty verdict since this decision unbound what can be considered as insider information. It has the potential to make it very difficult for employees to trade their stock even when not told insider info, but then just being smart.
  - sokoloff 9y ago
    I don’t find it a particularly borderline case. The bar for having insider information is not that it was handed to you or spoken/emailed and noted as insider info, but rather that you merely have it without regard to how much intelligence or effort you applied. This is in contrast to an outsider who can use a wide variety of means to synthesize material, non-public conclusions without falling afoul of insider trading laws. (Traffic counts, parking lot surveillance, deducing order flow from order IDs that a company might be leaking, etc. If a company insider argues that they did it that way, they’re likely to lose.) In this case, once Ying correctly deduces that Equifax is the company involved, he needs to block himself from trading and, if he has a question about his eligibility to trade, to seek personal counsel and/or the advise of his compliance officer.
    - freddie_mercury 9y ago
      > The bar for having insider information is not that it was handed to you or spoken/emailed and noted as insider info, but rather that you merely have it without regard to how much intelligence or effort you applied. That's not the bar; you just made that up. https://www.sec.gov/litigation/litreleases/2010/lr21678.htm https://www.sec.gov/litigation/litreleases/2010/lr21678.htm
dalore 9y ago
> Ying exercised all of his vested Equifax stock options and then sold the shares, reaping proceeds of nearly $1 million. According to the complaint, by selling before public disclosure of the data breach, Ying avoided more than $117,000 in losses So he has a million dollars, but to avoid losing 10% he risks everything, including jail time?
- loeg 9y ago
  He did not know in advance the stock price would only fall ~12%.
  - zspade 9y ago
    In all fairness...
  - dade_ 9y ago
    Exactly, the company could have gone bankrupt and he sold before the market knew the massive risk they were carrying. I am glad he has been charged.
    - loeg 9y ago
      Yeah. They probably should have gone bankrupt, and may still go bankrupt if enough people take them to small claims court or a class-action suit is filed (and won). But the news broke and their investors took it surprisingly well — apparently most do not anticipate anything like bankrupcy.
      - dalore 9y ago
        And they are mostly right. People cared and know the next news bite is out and they forget. Fickle creatures.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
jarcoal 9y ago
> Ying avoided more than $117,000 in losses. Seems like a pretty high risk for such low reward.
- lallysingh 9y ago
  You never know ahead of time how bad the stock will tank
lloydde 9y ago
So there wasn’t enough evidence against the executives that made smaller, relative to their total ownership, unplanned sales? In the case of the Equifax executives, though, the filings reporting their recent stock sales do not indicate the transactions were part of such plans. http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-equifax-insider-trading-20170908-story.html http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-equifax-insider-tradin... Earlier in the article I linked: Had they sold the same number of shares today, the executives would have made about $275,000 less than they did last month. Gamble alone would be out nearly $150,000.
broahmed 9y ago
"Ying exercised all of his vested Equifax stock options and then sold the shares, reaping proceeds of nearly $1 million. According to the complaint, by selling before public disclosure of the data breach, Ying avoided more than $117,000 in losses." I'm sure in hindsight $117,000 would seem a fair amount to not have the SEC on you. I'm surprised the losses avoided were so little.
- selectodude 9y ago
  Equifax should be bankrupt right now. The fact that they aren’t is an absolute failure of government. Ying wasn’t selling to save 10 percent, he was selling to save all of it. He just assumed that a catastrophe as bad as what Equifax did would actually have been punished. So did i...
craigc 9y ago
It is good that someone is being charged, but it would be nice if it was someone more senior. They always make the little guy take the fall. Avoiding $117,000 losses on $1 million is nothing compared to what some people get away with. The CEO, meanwhile, walked away with up to $90 million: http://fortune.com/2017/09/26/equifax-ceo-richard-smith-net-worth/ http://fortune.com/2017/09/26/equifax-ceo-richard-smith-net-... The other executives were “not aware” when they sold their shares: > Equifax, the credit report company hacked over the summer exposing the personal information of 145 million Americans, said a special committee has determined that none of the four executives who sold shares at the time did anything wrong. > The high-level executives sold shares worth a combined $1.8 million in the days immediately after the company discovered the breach. That is a pretty remarkable coincidence if you ask me. https://www.mercurynews.com/2017/11/03/equifax-4-executives-didnt-commit-insider-trading/ https://www.mercurynews.com/2017/11/03/equifax-4-executives-... -- For reference, the CEO of Intel sold $25 million worth of stock after hearing about the Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities before they were disclosed to the public, and he will probably be fine.
- ISL 9y ago
  It is the shareholders of Equifax who must take fall for the breach, for it is they who own and are responsible for the company. Many of us own, through index funds, a small amount of Equifax.
  - s73v3r_ 9y ago
    While I have no love lost for the shareholders of an evil company like that, I think that's the wrong attitude to take. As you pointed out, most shareholders aren't in any kind of a position to actually exercise any control over the company. I'd still put this on the executives. They're paid the big bucks to be responsible for the company. Yet, it seems that more and more, we're looking for ways to continue paying them the big bucks, but remove that responsibility. All carrot and no stick, as it were.
- JumpCrisscross 9y ago
  > They always make the little guy take the fall Taking the fall means "to bear the blame or punishment for another person's failure or misdeed" [1]. Ying is being charged with his own crimes alone. Furthermore, we have no evidence about whether (a) the other executives actually committed a violation, (b) Ying is the only one who left a prosecutable paper trail or (c) Ying will take a plea deal and co-operate against the others. [1] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/take_the_fall https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/take_the_fall
bluetwo 9y ago
Good job, SEC! (I'm serious.)
- arkis22 9y ago
  It really is what you hope to see!
smsm42 9y ago
One thing that I can't get here - this guy knew it's insider trading. Being CIO, he must have known there's a law against it. Did he expect to get away with it just because he's a CIO, like other Equifax high-levels did and like politicians and Congressmen routinely do? Did he somehow miscalculate, or is he kind of lightning rod so that nobody could say that there were no prosecutions, and in the meantime he'll be compensated for whatever fate he suffers?
- dboreham 9y ago
  Are we sure he wasn't just clueless? I get that a Silicon Valley CIO would know about SEC rules but perhaps a legacy industry CIO wouldn't? I mean, he didn't know that you have to keep track of vulnerabilities in the JARs you package into Internet-facing web services...
  - smsm42 9y ago
    I know it's illegal. The first thing I thought when I heard about Equifax exec selling their stock is "they are playing with fire, this sure looks like illegal insider trading". And I am nobody, and haven't lived in US for that long. CIO of a major corporation surely knows these things better than me. So either he knows a loophole I don't know (completely possible), or he had some hopes that what is illegal for me won't be for him. I am curious as to why he thought that. > I mean, he didn't know that you have to keep track of vulnerabilities in the JARs you package into Internet-facing web services I won't actually blame him for that. I mean, it was his screwup, as a CIO, but one that could happen to everybody, given some bad luck and some routine mistakes everybody could make from time to time. So here I am not surprised how it happened, I may not know the details but I am pretty sure I understand the general gist of how they got there. The trading part is different - here it's an apparent blatant and willful illegal conduct that is in the open and will be caught. Why a smart and successful man does it? I am curious.
  - grajaganDev 9y ago
    He was at a startup in the nineties, getting equity. He knows the SEC rules on insider trading.
thinkcomp 9y ago
Civil Docket: https://www.plainsite.org/dockets/3a2ojfzjx/georgia-northern-district-court/securities-and-exchange-commission-v-ying/ https://www.plainsite.org/dockets/3a2ojfzjx/georgia-northern... Criminal Docket: https://www.plainsite.org/dockets/3a2ok04e4/georgia-northern-district-court/usa-v-ying/ https://www.plainsite.org/dockets/3a2ok04e4/georgia-northern...
kakarot 9y ago
Cool, guess that means we can all stop talking about Equifax now and forget any of this ever happened.
peppershaker 9y ago
is it just me or does it always seem like some asian dude get busted
- jessaustin 9y ago
  It's too bad that there are no diversity statistics kept for insider trading prosecutions...
ggg9990 9y ago
Wow, he Googled it from a company computer. Proof that you don't need to be very smart to become CIO at a public company.
- mulmen 9y ago
  Alternately: smart people do dumb things sometimes. Perhaps we could even take a lesson that under stress people make bad decisions. It could be some kind of warning to us all.
cool-RR 9y ago
I kinda wonder how confident we can be in allegations of insider trading. Say there's a company like Equifax that was on the verge of disaster and a major fall in its stock price. How many executives and middle managers satisfy the two conditions of (1) having received stock in the company and (2) being somewhat aware of the impending disaster? I imagine dozens if not hundreds. At any given point, it's natural that some of these people are selling stocks for reasons unrelated to the disaster. I mean, imagine you're an employee who has stock in your company and want to sell it to buy a house or something. Do you basically have to ensure there's no impending disaster before you dare to sell your stock, otherwise you're a criminal?
- chillydawg 9y ago
  You'll be on an insiders list and will have to obey extra trading rules. Basically, you'd know not to make the mistake. You also usually have to inform the company secretary of your intent to trade. This is in the UK.
katebrooks 9y ago
Put it on executives and the seniors get away. Being involved in controversies it should be closed down.
spoonie 9y ago
On the topic of insider trading, I’m not asking for legal advice but I’m curious to hear other people’s opinions about whether or not something is insider trading that you could expect to get charged for. Consider, for example, that you work on the Bing team at a Microsoft and you know that you’re about to release a new search engine feature that’s Really Good (fast, accurate results, etc). You’re confident that it will do well in the market. Obviously you can’t trade Microsoft stock using this knowledge. But can you trade Google stock if you think it will affect Google’s stock price? On one hand I believe this is insider trading because I asked legal counsel at a company I was working at once and they said that “any material information is insider information, regardless of whether you’re an insider at that company or not”. Seems reasonable: it’s non-public information that you think will materially affect the stock market. On the other hand I don’t really think this is insider trading because this sounds like it would disqualify just about everyone from participating in the stock market of the industry they work in. P.S. This is an academic discussion because I don’t pick stocks, I passively invest with index funds.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
dang 9y ago
Discussed a couple weeks ago at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16584980 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16584980.

413 points by carbocation 9y ago

tantalor 9y ago

Insider trading is not a crime, per se

teej 9y ago
He was charged with illegal insider trading. It turns out that is in fact a crime. > Defendant Jun Ying (“Ying”) committed securities fraud by engaging in illegal insider trading. After being entrusted with material, nonpublic information about a massive cyber-intrusion and data breach suffered by his employer, Equifax Inc. (“Equifax” or “the company”), Ying exercised all his vested Equifax stock options and sold the shares prior to the public announcement of the breach. By selling when he did, Ying avoided losses in excess of $117,000.
- zwily 9y ago
  I just listened to a podcast today about insider trading... and apparently, there’s not actually a law against insider trading itself. Technically what you get prosecuted for is stealing information, or something like that. Obviously there is tons of case law to support the illegality of insider trading, but you can’t find an actual law that says “you will go to jail if you do insider trading”.
  - chc 9y ago
    I'm pretty sure SEC Rule 10b-5[1] covers insider trading, along with various supplementary rules. [1]: https://www.ecfr.gov/cgi-bin/retrieveECFR?gp=&SID=3d58bfb5f19c9ad7e1c1c20032a314df&mc=true&r=SECTION&n=se17.4.240_110b_65 https://www.ecfr.gov/cgi-bin/retrieveECFR?gp=&SID=3d58bfb5f1...
    - tanderson92 9y ago
      Technically, a Rule is not a Law.
  - sokoloff 9y ago
    There are anti-fraud provisions in securities law; insider trading is prosecuted as a form of fraud.
    - fludlight 9y ago
      This methodology is not uncommon. Mail fraud and bribery of foreign officials are prosecuted as "depriving the public of honest services".
unreal37 9y ago
Apparently, though, he was not specifically told that Equifax had a data breach. He guessed they did based on a project he was being asked to drop everything and help out with. It'll be an interesting case if he pleads not guilty.
- oh_sigh 9y ago
  Yeah, I hope he fights the charges just so I can selfishly see how it plays out. It seems there is a strong paper trail of execs intentionally keeping ying out of the loop. If that's the case, and he figures out that everyone is just acting weird, it doesn't seem so straight forward that he was trading with material information. If I work at Amazon as a lowly sde and see Jeff bezos fuming in a conference room with the chief privacy and security officers, and I assume Amazon had a data breach and sell my stock, did I insider trade?
  - unclebucknasty 9y ago
    It's an interesting question, as even with the insight that everyone is "acting weird", he would have still been trading with more info than the average investor. OTOH, many execs would be privy to more info than the average investor as a matter of course, and we certainly don't prohibit them from trading. So, where is the line drawn?
  - billylindeman 9y ago
    i'd be very interested in knowing that as well. doesn't seem like it'd be material information
- chris_wot 9y ago
  If he guessed based on being told to drop everything... then he still knew there was something seriously wrong before everyone else. That's insider trading.
  - mulmen 9y ago
    But is it illegal insider trading? This is an honest question.

taspeotis 9y ago

Related reading: https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-03-15/is-insider-guessing-illegal https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-03-15/is-inside...

jnordwick 9y ago
Matt Levine, always interesting. Not related, but required to fully underarms how different this case is. Defendant wasnt given insider information, and prosecution accepts this as true. He kept being told he was doing a project for another company, but he slowly figured out that was fabricated story and correctly deduced it was for his own, Equifax. This is such a borderline and interesting case. I would definitely have preferred a not guilty verdict since this decision unbound what can be considered as insider information. It has the potential to make it very difficult for employees to trade their stock even when not told insider info, but then just being smart.
- sokoloff 9y ago
  I don’t find it a particularly borderline case. The bar for having insider information is not that it was handed to you or spoken/emailed and noted as insider info, but rather that you merely have it without regard to how much intelligence or effort you applied. This is in contrast to an outsider who can use a wide variety of means to synthesize material, non-public conclusions without falling afoul of insider trading laws. (Traffic counts, parking lot surveillance, deducing order flow from order IDs that a company might be leaking, etc. If a company insider argues that they did it that way, they’re likely to lose.) In this case, once Ying correctly deduces that Equifax is the company involved, he needs to block himself from trading and, if he has a question about his eligibility to trade, to seek personal counsel and/or the advise of his compliance officer.
  - freddie_mercury 9y ago
    > The bar for having insider information is not that it was handed to you or spoken/emailed and noted as insider info, but rather that you merely have it without regard to how much intelligence or effort you applied. That's not the bar; you just made that up. https://www.sec.gov/litigation/litreleases/2010/lr21678.htm https://www.sec.gov/litigation/litreleases/2010/lr21678.htm

dalore 9y ago

> Ying exercised all of his vested Equifax stock options and then sold the shares, reaping proceeds of nearly $1 million. According to the complaint, by selling before public disclosure of the data breach, Ying avoided more than $117,000 in losses So he has a million dollars, but to avoid losing 10% he risks everything, including jail time?

loeg 9y ago
He did not know in advance the stock price would only fall ~12%.
- zspade 9y ago
  In all fairness...
- dade_ 9y ago
  Exactly, the company could have gone bankrupt and he sold before the market knew the massive risk they were carrying. I am glad he has been charged.
  - loeg 9y ago
    Yeah. They probably should have gone bankrupt, and may still go bankrupt if enough people take them to small claims court or a class-action suit is filed (and won). But the news broke and their investors took it surprisingly well — apparently most do not anticipate anything like bankrupcy.
    - dalore 9y ago
      And they are mostly right. People cared and know the next news bite is out and they forget. Fickle creatures.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

jarcoal 9y ago

> Ying avoided more than $117,000 in losses. Seems like a pretty high risk for such low reward.

lallysingh 9y ago
You never know ahead of time how bad the stock will tank

lloydde 9y ago

So there wasn’t enough evidence against the executives that made smaller, relative to their total ownership, unplanned sales? In the case of the Equifax executives, though, the filings reporting their recent stock sales do not indicate the transactions were part of such plans. http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-equifax-insider-trading-20170908-story.html http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-equifax-insider-tradin... Earlier in the article I linked: Had they sold the same number of shares today, the executives would have made about $275,000 less than they did last month. Gamble alone would be out nearly $150,000.

broahmed 9y ago

"Ying exercised all of his vested Equifax stock options and then sold the shares, reaping proceeds of nearly $1 million. According to the complaint, by selling before public disclosure of the data breach, Ying avoided more than $117,000 in losses." I'm sure in hindsight $117,000 would seem a fair amount to not have the SEC on you. I'm surprised the losses avoided were so little.

selectodude 9y ago
Equifax should be bankrupt right now. The fact that they aren’t is an absolute failure of government. Ying wasn’t selling to save 10 percent, he was selling to save all of it. He just assumed that a catastrophe as bad as what Equifax did would actually have been punished. So did i...

craigc 9y ago

It is good that someone is being charged, but it would be nice if it was someone more senior. They always make the little guy take the fall. Avoiding $117,000 losses on $1 million is nothing compared to what some people get away with. The CEO, meanwhile, walked away with up to $90 million: http://fortune.com/2017/09/26/equifax-ceo-richard-smith-net-worth/ http://fortune.com/2017/09/26/equifax-ceo-richard-smith-net-... The other executives were “not aware” when they sold their shares: > Equifax, the credit report company hacked over the summer exposing the personal information of 145 million Americans, said a special committee has determined that none of the four executives who sold shares at the time did anything wrong. > The high-level executives sold shares worth a combined $1.8 million in the days immediately after the company discovered the breach. That is a pretty remarkable coincidence if you ask me. https://www.mercurynews.com/2017/11/03/equifax-4-executives-didnt-commit-insider-trading/ https://www.mercurynews.com/2017/11/03/equifax-4-executives-... -- For reference, the CEO of Intel sold $25 million worth of stock after hearing about the Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities before they were disclosed to the public, and he will probably be fine.

ISL 9y ago
It is the shareholders of Equifax who must take fall for the breach, for it is they who own and are responsible for the company. Many of us own, through index funds, a small amount of Equifax.
- s73v3r_ 9y ago
  While I have no love lost for the shareholders of an evil company like that, I think that's the wrong attitude to take. As you pointed out, most shareholders aren't in any kind of a position to actually exercise any control over the company. I'd still put this on the executives. They're paid the big bucks to be responsible for the company. Yet, it seems that more and more, we're looking for ways to continue paying them the big bucks, but remove that responsibility. All carrot and no stick, as it were.
JumpCrisscross 9y ago
> They always make the little guy take the fall Taking the fall means "to bear the blame or punishment for another person's failure or misdeed" [1]. Ying is being charged with his own crimes alone. Furthermore, we have no evidence about whether (a) the other executives actually committed a violation, (b) Ying is the only one who left a prosecutable paper trail or (c) Ying will take a plea deal and co-operate against the others. [1] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/take_the_fall https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/take_the_fall

bluetwo 9y ago

Good job, SEC! (I'm serious.)

arkis22 9y ago
It really is what you hope to see!

smsm42 9y ago

One thing that I can't get here - this guy knew it's insider trading. Being CIO, he must have known there's a law against it. Did he expect to get away with it just because he's a CIO, like other Equifax high-levels did and like politicians and Congressmen routinely do? Did he somehow miscalculate, or is he kind of lightning rod so that nobody could say that there were no prosecutions, and in the meantime he'll be compensated for whatever fate he suffers?

dboreham 9y ago
Are we sure he wasn't just clueless? I get that a Silicon Valley CIO would know about SEC rules but perhaps a legacy industry CIO wouldn't? I mean, he didn't know that you have to keep track of vulnerabilities in the JARs you package into Internet-facing web services...
- smsm42 9y ago
  I know it's illegal. The first thing I thought when I heard about Equifax exec selling their stock is "they are playing with fire, this sure looks like illegal insider trading". And I am nobody, and haven't lived in US for that long. CIO of a major corporation surely knows these things better than me. So either he knows a loophole I don't know (completely possible), or he had some hopes that what is illegal for me won't be for him. I am curious as to why he thought that. > I mean, he didn't know that you have to keep track of vulnerabilities in the JARs you package into Internet-facing web services I won't actually blame him for that. I mean, it was his screwup, as a CIO, but one that could happen to everybody, given some bad luck and some routine mistakes everybody could make from time to time. So here I am not surprised how it happened, I may not know the details but I am pretty sure I understand the general gist of how they got there. The trading part is different - here it's an apparent blatant and willful illegal conduct that is in the open and will be caught. Why a smart and successful man does it? I am curious.
- grajaganDev 9y ago
  He was at a startup in the nineties, getting equity. He knows the SEC rules on insider trading.

thinkcomp 9y ago

Civil Docket: https://www.plainsite.org/dockets/3a2ojfzjx/georgia-northern-district-court/securities-and-exchange-commission-v-ying/ https://www.plainsite.org/dockets/3a2ojfzjx/georgia-northern... Criminal Docket: https://www.plainsite.org/dockets/3a2ok04e4/georgia-northern-district-court/usa-v-ying/ https://www.plainsite.org/dockets/3a2ok04e4/georgia-northern...

kakarot 9y ago

Cool, guess that means we can all stop talking about Equifax now and forget any of this ever happened.

peppershaker 9y ago

is it just me or does it always seem like some asian dude get busted

jessaustin 9y ago
It's too bad that there are no diversity statistics kept for insider trading prosecutions...

ggg9990 9y ago

Wow, he Googled it from a company computer. Proof that you don't need to be very smart to become CIO at a public company.

mulmen 9y ago
Alternately: smart people do dumb things sometimes. Perhaps we could even take a lesson that under stress people make bad decisions. It could be some kind of warning to us all.

cool-RR 9y ago

I kinda wonder how confident we can be in allegations of insider trading. Say there's a company like Equifax that was on the verge of disaster and a major fall in its stock price. How many executives and middle managers satisfy the two conditions of (1) having received stock in the company and (2) being somewhat aware of the impending disaster? I imagine dozens if not hundreds. At any given point, it's natural that some of these people are selling stocks for reasons unrelated to the disaster. I mean, imagine you're an employee who has stock in your company and want to sell it to buy a house or something. Do you basically have to ensure there's no impending disaster before you dare to sell your stock, otherwise you're a criminal?

chillydawg 9y ago
You'll be on an insiders list and will have to obey extra trading rules. Basically, you'd know not to make the mistake. You also usually have to inform the company secretary of your intent to trade. This is in the UK.

katebrooks 9y ago

Put it on executives and the seniors get away. Being involved in controversies it should be closed down.

spoonie 9y ago

On the topic of insider trading, I’m not asking for legal advice but I’m curious to hear other people’s opinions about whether or not something is insider trading that you could expect to get charged for. Consider, for example, that you work on the Bing team at a Microsoft and you know that you’re about to release a new search engine feature that’s Really Good (fast, accurate results, etc). You’re confident that it will do well in the market. Obviously you can’t trade Microsoft stock using this knowledge. But can you trade Google stock if you think it will affect Google’s stock price? On one hand I believe this is insider trading because I asked legal counsel at a company I was working at once and they said that “any material information is insider information, regardless of whether you’re an insider at that company or not”. Seems reasonable: it’s non-public information that you think will materially affect the stock market. On the other hand I don’t really think this is insider trading because this sounds like it would disqualify just about everyone from participating in the stock market of the industry they work in. P.S. This is an academic discussion because I don’t pick stocks, I passively invest with index funds.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

dang 9y ago

Discussed a couple weeks ago at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16584980 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16584980.