I agree that insider trading is less prevalent than people think, simply because lots of people love to believe in conspiracy theories, and put on a tin foil ha

I agree that insider trading is less prevalent than people think, simply because lots of people love to believe in conspiracy theories, and put on a tin foil hat. However, in the Bloomberg article you mentioned, it was cited that the hackers had a 77% success rate. Any serious investor would tell you that's an incredibly high success rate, as it's impossible to be 100% right all the time. If you had that hit rate, you're almost guaranteed to beat the index by a very large margin. Lastly, it's possible to still have insider info, and not make money on the trade. That doesn't make it legal, though, does it? I think that's still insider trading - it's just making the wrong bet. If I had access to all insider info, I'd be super picky. Ignore 99% of what I hear (ie 16M Americans are unemployed, big whoop! everyone knows), and only trade on the 1% of info that will almost certainly move the markets (ie COVID-19 will shutdown entire cities). Extremely difficult to do if you love trading, but the optimal strategy.