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If you trust Wikipedia, this is the first sentence in the US section on insider trading: "Until the 21st century and the European Union's market abuse laws, the
by albntomat0 6y ago
If you trust Wikipedia, this is the first sentence in the US section on insider trading: "Until the 21st century and the European Union's market abuse laws, the United States was the leading country in prohibiting insider trading made on the basis of material non-public information."[0]
I'm not a lawyer, nor do I work in finance, but I think the key is what exactly constitutes "non-public information." I can trade on all the public information regarding Tesla's cars, like reviews, published production numbers, and Elon's tweets and my own analysis of all tat but not on the word of a someone who works there saying they've got some big unexpected news.
There's a bunch of interesting cases about whats on the edge, for example, commercial satellite imagery to count cars in parking lots[1].
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insider_trading#United_States_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insider_trading#United_States_...
[1]: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/05/stock-value-satellite-images-investing/586009/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/05/stock-v...
- derivativethrow 6y agoNo, material and nonpublic is necessary but insufficient for the trading to be illegal. It must also break a confidentiality agreement, fiduciary duty or specific law pertaining to the way the information is released to the person and their duties thereof. This is to say that it's illegal for congresspeople to trade on material, nonpublic information because there is now a law explicitly governing it. If they (or anyone) develop the material, nonpublic information through original research, it's not illegal. Don't trust Wikipedia summaries for these things.
- albntomat0 6y agoDo you have a good source to recommend with a more detailed overview?
- derivativethrow 6y agoRead the SEC documentation on insider trading directly. Barring that, Matt Levine gives accessible (and entertaining) which is informative for a lay audience.