3 ms·

It would be nice if SEC were this dogged in its pursuit of actual insider trading.

• arthurcolle 6y ago
  Haha, that's a good one.
• vkou 6y ago
  It is. Insider trading is one of the few things it is really good at prosecuting - mostly because it's dead-easy to identify, easy to prove, often performed by idiots, and has a lot of incredibly-well established law surrounding it that makes turning piles of evidence into jail time easy. None of these reasons hold for other financial crimes, which is why there are so few bankers and executives going to jail for everything that's not insider trading.
  • kortilla 6y ago
    Providing lots of examples of prosecutions does nothing to prove they catch even the majority of insider trades because there is no ground truth to work with here. Maybe the SEC is just good at catching people who don’t think through the paper trail.
  • jessaustin 6y ago
    Most "insider trading" is done by senior executives. As you observe, only non-connected "idiots" are ever prosecuted for insider trading. This "crime" is merely a way for corporate insiders to enforce penalties against those who defect from their conspiracy against the investing public. Non-insiders who trade on "inside" information release that information to the public, to the public's benefit, before the actual insiders are ready to profit at the public's expense.