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> Nathaniel Brown, [..] repeatedly tipped Infinera’s unannounced quarterly earnings and financial performance to his best friend, Benjamin Wylam > Wylam, [..]

> Nathaniel Brown, [..] repeatedly tipped Infinera’s unannounced quarterly earnings and financial performance to his best friend, Benjamin Wylam > Wylam, [..] and also tipped Naveen Sood > Sood allegedly traded on this information and tipped his three friends Marcus Bannon, Matthew Rauch, and Naresh Ramaiya It's less a ring and more a tree One of the issues with leaking the info - you have no control over what is done with it and who acts on it, and it all potentially leads back to you There was a case in Australia where a gov insider was leaking government data. He thought he had a partnership with a co-conspirator where they would make low-tens-of-thousands He only found out after his arrest that his co-conspirator who was placing the trades was making millions - which is what got them noticed (he was one of the largest individual currency traders in the country - and never missed)

mdoms 5y ago
There's an incredibly good 7-part podcast on the Australian case you're talking about, if anyone's interested. It's called The Sure Thing. https://www.afr.com/podcast/the-sure-thing https://www.afr.com/podcast/the-sure-thing
- tayloramurphy 5y ago
  Thank you for sharing this! I'm going to add it to my listening queue.
dheera 5y ago
Why don't we apply Darwinism to the financial world? The fittest survive. If you can make friends with people who have insider info, you should be rewarded with your networking prowess. It's quite an underrated skill. That's how startup investing works anyway. Separately, announce earnings with some injected noise. Keep announcing corrections in the following several days so that it eventually converges to the correct value. That would be fun! I'd absolutely love to see the Wall Street suit-and-tie hedgehog fund people writhing in anguish while the retail investors don't take a shit.
- aeternum 5y ago
  Quarterly earnings is pretty antiquated anyway. Perhaps public companies should just report continuous / daily earnings via automated accounting software. This should make it harder to hide accounting fraud and improve transparency and market fairness.
  - dheera 5y ago
    Perhaps. But why do we actually care about market fairness? I care that companies get shit done. I want to see electric cars, cancer cures, solar power, and vaccines. I don't care that the markets are fair. If an unfair market means I get those things faster I'm all for it. FWIW I get cheaper strawberries than most people because I'm good at bargaining. Markets aren't supposed to be fair, they're supposed to factor in these kind of soft skills.
    - haswell 5y ago
      > But why do we actually care about market fairness? I'm having a hard time understanding why you believe this is even a question, but I'm trying... Let me ask you a different question: should the CEO of a company who knows about a major upcoming change (positive or negative) be allowed to trade on that information? After all, based on your arguments so far "they should be rewarded for rising the the position of CEO". Do you not see a fundamental issue with a system that guarantees unfairness? If I'm allowed to trade on insider info, and everyone else trading knows that, can you imagine the downstream consequences? e.g. every time I trade, the entire market will now react, because the very fact that I'm trading now might indicate something about the fundamentals of the stock. > Markets aren't supposed to be fair, they're supposed to factor in these kind of soft skills. What makes you believe/conclude this? Fairness in markets doesn't mean we all pay the same price, nor do "soft skills" really play into modern day stock trading. Buying cheap strawberries is a cute analogy, but is an apples/oranges comparison, and one involves a consumable product, while the other involves buying a stake in a company based on information that's supposed to be available to everyone else interested in buying a stake in the company. You may not believe fairness is needed, but that doesn't change that those are the rules we operate under, and most participants in the stock market would fundamentally disagree with you.

mdoms 5y ago

There's an incredibly good 7-part podcast on the Australian case you're talking about, if anyone's interested. It's called The Sure Thing. https://www.afr.com/podcast/the-sure-thing https://www.afr.com/podcast/the-sure-thing

tayloramurphy 5y ago
Thank you for sharing this! I'm going to add it to my listening queue.

dheera 5y ago

Why don't we apply Darwinism to the financial world? The fittest survive. If you can make friends with people who have insider info, you should be rewarded with your networking prowess. It's quite an underrated skill. That's how startup investing works anyway. Separately, announce earnings with some injected noise. Keep announcing corrections in the following several days so that it eventually converges to the correct value. That would be fun! I'd absolutely love to see the Wall Street suit-and-tie hedgehog fund people writhing in anguish while the retail investors don't take a shit.

aeternum 5y ago
Quarterly earnings is pretty antiquated anyway. Perhaps public companies should just report continuous / daily earnings via automated accounting software. This should make it harder to hide accounting fraud and improve transparency and market fairness.
- dheera 5y ago
  Perhaps. But why do we actually care about market fairness? I care that companies get shit done. I want to see electric cars, cancer cures, solar power, and vaccines. I don't care that the markets are fair. If an unfair market means I get those things faster I'm all for it. FWIW I get cheaper strawberries than most people because I'm good at bargaining. Markets aren't supposed to be fair, they're supposed to factor in these kind of soft skills.
  - haswell 5y ago
    > But why do we actually care about market fairness? I'm having a hard time understanding why you believe this is even a question, but I'm trying... Let me ask you a different question: should the CEO of a company who knows about a major upcoming change (positive or negative) be allowed to trade on that information? After all, based on your arguments so far "they should be rewarded for rising the the position of CEO". Do you not see a fundamental issue with a system that guarantees unfairness? If I'm allowed to trade on insider info, and everyone else trading knows that, can you imagine the downstream consequences? e.g. every time I trade, the entire market will now react, because the very fact that I'm trading now might indicate something about the fundamentals of the stock. > Markets aren't supposed to be fair, they're supposed to factor in these kind of soft skills. What makes you believe/conclude this? Fairness in markets doesn't mean we all pay the same price, nor do "soft skills" really play into modern day stock trading. Buying cheap strawberries is a cute analogy, but is an apples/oranges comparison, and one involves a consumable product, while the other involves buying a stake in a company based on information that's supposed to be available to everyone else interested in buying a stake in the company. You may not believe fairness is needed, but that doesn't change that those are the rules we operate under, and most participants in the stock market would fundamentally disagree with you.