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Some information has material amounts of actual dollar value. Whoever knows that your employer has an acquisition in the works that will be announced tomorrow h
by ThrustVectoring 7y ago
Some information has material amounts of actual dollar value. Whoever knows that your employer has an acquisition in the works that will be announced tomorrow has an extraordinarily easy way to monetize that. This information rightfully belongs to your employer, who is keeping it under wraps for financially important business reasons. Sharing it or acting on it means enriching yourself at the expense of those business reasons (or more directly, through influencing stock prices).
- mochomocha 7y agoI know that. I'm asking specifically about the semantics of "theft" vs "fairness" here. I don't think the word "theft" makes much sense in this context.
- sokoloff 7y agoI think the theft angle here is analogous to the theft angle in piracy of digital content. When I take information entrusted to me by my company and use that information to profit in the market, I have taken information, used it in a manner not authorized, and profited. That's different from someone else unaffiliated with the company independently deriving the information, using it in the market, and profiting. As an example, the researchers who discovered VW's cheating on diesel emissions tests (assuming they were independent) would be perfectly within their rights to short or buy puts on Volkswagen. VW executives who were responding to the EPA inquiry or otherwise discovered the cheating would not be within their rights. In both cases, there was a moment where that information was material to the valuation of VW and not public, yet one group could legally trade on it and another could not.
- ThrustVectoring 7y agoIt's theft in the same way that copying the address and secret key of a bitcoin wallet is theft.