Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

SEC charges former Amazon finance manager and family with insider trading

sec.gov

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 143 posts

Re: SEC charges former Amazon finance manager and family with insider trading

#61

Post by mc32 »

timack wrote: post #33
bredren wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People do really dumb things for relatively small amounts of money. Look up examples of corruption in US city administrators. You’ll see people who throw away their career over $30k.

Martha Stewart was jailed for avoiding a loss of ~$45k USD.

I think she gets a bad rap. Obviously being wealthy makes her unsympathetic, but that's peanuts. And they 'got' he for 'lying' and not for securities fraud -among the original charges.

But the thing is there are much bigger fish to fry --why not go after international investors who have sheel companies within shell companies, etc. But... I mean, I guess this is a career bump or bonus for someone doing investigations.

Re: SEC charges former Amazon finance manager and family with insider trading

#62

Post by renewiltord »

notional wrote: post #8

As alleged, the family reaped illicit profits of approximately $1.4 million from their unlawful trading in Amazon securities. Did anyone really need insider information to know Amazon stock was going to rise? Although $1.4 million is life changing amount of money, I feel like for these people who were already being generously compensated in Amazon stock, it probably wasn't worth the risk, especially given the quote b…

Haha, that's funny. But no, usually with options the hard part is pricing it accurately. So, for instance, if you look at AMZN for next July, you'll see the options are very expensive. AMZN may well rise but unless you know better you will still lose money on OTM calls.

That's because the option has a time value (which depreciates by theta) and a stock correlation (which says how much it goes up by an increase in the stock). You need the stock to go up faster than the market currently believes it will in order to make money on OTM calls.

TANSTAAFL. You can't just buy OTM options and make money.

Re: SEC charges former Amazon finance manager and family with insider trading

#63

Post by kube-system »

notional wrote: post #25
TallGuyShort wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it really is widely known that a stock will definitely rise at some point in the future, that very quickly gets priced into the stock price now. It goes up gradually as confidence that it will go up goes up.

And looking at AMZN stock price it has risen consistently since IPO. Yall take things waayyy too seriously to not understand the humour in stating the obvious of Amazon's stock price though.

That would be relevant if these were stocks bought at IPO, or bought and held for the long term. This situation was neither of those. AMZN fluctuates in the short term like any other stock.

Re: SEC charges former Amazon finance manager and family with insider trading

#64

Post by chihuahua »

ponker wrote: post #45
timack wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Martha Stewart was jailed for avoiding a loss of ~$45k USD.

With a net worth of over $300 million.

I thought it was interesting and inexplicable (to me) that she would even bother buying a handful of shares and then selling them based on insider information. It makes no sense to me that someone who already had that much money would want to waste her time and attention on making a few extra dollars. I'm not saying it didn't happen, I'm just saying I don't understand why she would even be interested.

Re: SEC charges former Amazon finance manager and family with insider trading

#65

Post by TeMPOraL »

boulos wrote: post #60

For those wondering “really, they had the Amazon earnings ahead of time and only made $1.4M?” this reminded me of a good Matt Levine writeup about a group of folks who obtained massive numbers of earnings reports ahead of time [1]. Having the clear knowledge of the earnings report doesn’t give you perfect knowledge on how to trade it / the reaction! > Their performance is statistically significantly greater than that…

Remember the recent Twitter attack, where malicious actors were able to post from many high-profile & verified accounts? The attackers could've done just about anything. Moved stocks. Start World War 3. And all they did was try a cryptocurrency scam that netted them $couple-thousand.

Re: SEC charges former Amazon finance manager and family with insider trading

#66

Post by filmgirlcw »

woeirua wrote: post #59

This family will likely be ruined by these charges. Even if they successfully defend against these charges, the lawyer fees will wreck them financially. Meanwhile, Mr. Musk has literally gotten a slap on the wrist for multiple flagrant violations of securities law. There are definitely two justice systems in the US. The ultra-rich do not play by the same rules that you and I do.

This is absolutely true but let’s not pretend this family didn’t violate the law here either.

Like, there should be a middle ground between “if you’re rich enough, you get away with anything” and “it’s acceptable for a person in finance to share insider information with family members so they can profit.”

Re: SEC charges former Amazon finance manager and family with insider trading

#67

Post by SomewhatLikely »

ozten wrote: post #21

How often is jail time included in these types of cases? If they merely lost their profits, this isn't much of a punishment.

From the article:

> In a parallel action, the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Western District of Washington today filed criminal charges against Viky Bohra.

Re: SEC charges former Amazon finance manager and family with insider trading

#68

Post by sokoloff »

notional wrote: post #25
TallGuyShort wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it really is widely known that a stock will definitely rise at some point in the future, that very quickly gets priced into the stock price now. It goes up gradually as confidence that it will go up goes up.

And looking at AMZN stock price it has risen consistently since IPO. Yall take things waayyy too seriously to not understand the humour in stating the obvious of Amazon's stock price though.

> looking at AMZN stock price it has risen consistently since IPO.

We might have different definitions of "risen consistently".

AMZN traded as high as $105.06 in 1999 down over 94% to as low as $5.97 in 2001.

Re: SEC charges former Amazon finance manager and family with insider trading

#69

Post by filmgirlcw »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #65
boulos wrote: post #60

For those wondering “really, they had the Amazon earnings ahead of time and only made $1.4M?” this reminded me of a good Matt Levine writeup about a group of folks who obtained massive numbers of earnings reports ahead of time [1]. Having the clear knowledge of the earnings report doesn’t give you perfect knowledge on how to trade it / the reaction! > Their performance is statistically significantly greater than that…

Remember the recent Twitter attack, where malicious actors were able to post from many high-profile & verified accounts? The attackers could've done just about anything. Moved stocks. Start World War 3. And all they did was try a cryptocurrency scam that netted them $couple-thousand.

Well, that’s because it was literal children going after rare usernames who then pivoted to dumb crypto scams.

Which reading this complaint, sounds like the same dumb criminal mindset as these people.

Re: SEC charges former Amazon finance manager and family with insider trading

#70

Post by boulos »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #65
boulos wrote: post #60

For those wondering “really, they had the Amazon earnings ahead of time and only made $1.4M?” this reminded me of a good Matt Levine writeup about a group of folks who obtained massive numbers of earnings reports ahead of time [1]. Having the clear knowledge of the earnings report doesn’t give you perfect knowledge on how to trade it / the reaction! > Their performance is statistically significantly greater than that…

Remember the recent Twitter attack, where malicious actors were able to post from many high-profile & verified accounts? The attackers could've done just about anything. Moved stocks. Start World War 3. And all they did was try a cryptocurrency scam that netted them $couple-thousand.

Matt Levine again: https://mobile.twitter.com/matt_levine/status/12835030809784... :)
Post reply on HN