I mean there are companies that have software that downloads and analyzes press releases (Fed meeting minutes, corporate reports, etc) and bases trades on them.

I mean there are companies that have software that downloads and analyzes press releases (Fed meeting minutes, corporate reports, etc) and bases trades on them. That’s not something I can do. So the folks who analyze “public” information fast enough effectively turn it into “private information” for the first few milliseconds. The apocryphal story about the Rothschilds building special boats to report the outcome of Waterloo is like that. So it seems that you can have massively asymmetrical information, as long as it’s passed on public info. Which seems like a dumb distinction. In regards to congressmen, they’re often the first people to be exposed to new public information. So the distinction between public and private is less clear for them.