> That said this case seems cut and dry, their employment contract explicitly prohibited them from trading in stock of any company if they had non public inform

> That said this case seems cut and dry, their employment contract explicitly prohibited them from trading in stock of any company if they had non public information that could impact price, and they made the trades 7 minutes after learning the information[1]. It’s hard to see how they could plausibly argue they did not at minimum breach their employment contract, if nothing else. It does seem cut and dried that he breached the employment contract. That is very different from being found guilty of a crime though (this was a criminal case). I'll be interested to see how this and other cases on the edge of insider trading turn out. Things get murky when someone relies on correlations between stock prices (and this fellow lost money on some of the options he sold just a few weeks later, which indicates how imperfect the correlations can be).