Trump2cash – A stock trading bot powered by Trump tweets

As the poster doesn't this gives Trump the power to manipulate markets with nothing more than a tweet?

You could argue he already has this power, but before the message needed to resonate with a large collective of people. Any public figure (like Warren Buffet, etc) can express an opinion that might effect the stock they are commenting on.

However as this group of people automate trades on only the contents of his tweets (and not say the contents of the tweet as well as past company performance, current POTUS approval ratings, dividend plans etc) he gains a scary amount of control over the markets.

To put another way. The only people who know what he will tweet earlier than these bots are Trump and maybe a select group of people he tells before hand.

>In the United States, Canada, Australia and Germany, for mandatory reporting purposes, corporate insiders are defined as a company's officers, directors and any beneficial owners of more than 10% of a class of the company's equity securities. Trades made by these types of insiders in the company's own stock, based on material non-public information, are considered fraudulent since the insiders are violating the fiduciary duty that they owe to the shareholders. The corporate insider, simply by accepting employment, has undertaken a legal obligation to the shareholders to put the shareholders' interests before their own, in matters related to the corporation. When insiders buy or sell based upon company-owned information, they are violating their obligation to the shareholders.

Presumably it's not this chapter you're referring to.

>For example, illegal insider trading would occur if the chief executive officer of Company A learned (prior to a public announcement) that Company A will be taken over and then bought shares in Company A while knowing that the share price would likely rise.

Probably not this one either

>In the United States and many other jurisdictions, however, "insiders" are not just limited to corporate officials and major shareholders where illegal insider trading is concerned but can include any individual who trades shares based on material non-public information in violation of some duty of trust. This duty may be imputed; for example, in many jurisdictions, in cases of where a corporate insider "tips" a friend about non-public information likely to have an effect on the company's share price, the duty the corporate insider owes the company is now imputed to the friend and the friend violates a duty to the company if he trades on the basis of this information.

Despite the fact that this chapter doesn't contain anything relevant either, it's probably this one you're referring to. There's no corporate insiders or relationships involving a duty of trust here.

I think you may be misinterpreting your source.

Comparing the last version of STVI's Investor Relations page on archive.org [1] (May 2016 pre Snapchat company name change) to the version today [2], I'm not convinced they aren't trying to be intentionally deceptive. It almost looks like they rewrote their description to sound vaguely like Snapchat.

May 2016:

> Snap Interactive, Inc. (“SNAP”) develops, owns and operates dating applications for social networking websites and mobile platforms. SNAP’s flagship brand, FirstMet.com, is a multi-platform online dating site with a large user database of approximately 30 million users. FirstMet.com‘s mission is to improve the online dating experience of meeting new people by integrating a user’s friends and interests to enable more meaningful connections. SNAP’s newest application, The Grade, is a patent-pending mobile dating application catering to high-quality singles.

Present (emphasis mine):

> Snap Interactive, Inc. (“SNAP”) (OTCQB: STVI) develops, owns and operates real-time, rich media social networking and dating applications on desktop and mobile computing platforms. Supported by a portfolio of 25 patents, SNAP is a leader in real-time video communication, with groundbreaking products powering one of the world’s largest collections of video-based communities. Through brands such as Paltalk, FirstMet, Camfrog and Tinychat, SNAP has helped hundreds of millions of users around the world make meaningful friendships and romantic connections.

[1]: http://web.archive.org/web/20160506160057/http://www.snap-in...

[2]: http://www.snap-interactive.com/investor-relations/

Politicians impacting the stock market is nothing new. Pipeline and coal companies plummeted with Obama's executive orders, and the executive branch DOJ created a huge drop in prison stocks with what was effectively an indirect tweet. Solar stocks zig zagged according to the latest Solyndra and renewables subsidy activity. The only thing new is Twitter as a more easily machine-readable mouthpiece.

Congress actually gets a free pass on buying and selling stocks with insider information and many have done so for decades: http://www.cbsnews.com/news/congress-trading-stock-on-inside...