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

$70M in 60 Seconds: How Insider Info Helped Someone 28x Their Money

data-and-politics.ghost.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 480 posts

Re: $70M in 60 Seconds: How Insider Info Helped Someone 28x Their Money

#61

Post by kulahan »

LeafItAlone wrote: post #51
nramanand wrote: post #13

A relevant aside: surely insider trading is happening all the time? There are so many daily market-shifting events involving so many privy parties that it seems inevitable to happen every few minutes (not defending the actions in the article). How many physicians have been able to get rich from learning a CEO will be out of commission? In that case, I'm not even sure whether it would be considered insider trading. Ho…

>How many physicians have been able to get rich from learning a CEO will be out of commission? Do you actually have an answer to that? Or are you just throwing out an unanswerable question as some form of “gotcha”? Now I’m actually curious. There aren’t _that_ many publicly traded companies; only about 4,000 according to Google. A little over 9,000 IPOs since 1980 [0]. The number of companies where the CEO being “out…

Never in a million years would I have guessed that there have only been 9000 IPOs in the last nearly half-century. Really drives home how many US businesses are privately owned.

Re: $70M in 60 Seconds: How Insider Info Helped Someone 28x Their Money

#62

Post by dataflow »

eru wrote: post #43
solardev wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the past, we liked to pretend this was illegal. Now we don't even bother with that.

Insider trading in the US is more about misappropriating information that belong to a party you have fiduciary duties to, not so much about harm to the public. For example, imagine you are working for Warren Buffet and you learn that he has quietly bought some stocks and next weeks he's going to announce that. Assume that this announcement will reliably make the stock trade up. If you trade on that information, that'…

> Notice that from the point of view of the anonymous counter party trading with you on the stock exchange, both situations look exactly the same. [...] So making insider trading legal in the US wouldn't make the general public any worse off.

Eh? If nothing else, doesn't it magnify the public's risk beyond whatever impact Buffet could have on his own? How can you possibly claim there is no difference?

You might as well say: imagine you secretly give another country nuclear weapons, and assume that that country plans to use them. Now imagine you plan to use them for the same purpose yourself. From the viewpoint of the public, the situation is exactly the same. So nuclear proliferation wouldn't make the general public any worse off.

Or imagine the president picks a random person by lottery every day to run the country while he goes to play golf. The president can take the same actions himself, so from the standpoint of the general public, nobody would be worse off.

Re: $70M in 60 Seconds: How Insider Info Helped Someone 28x Their Money

#63

Post by vanviegen »

eru wrote: post #43
solardev wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the past, we liked to pretend this was illegal. Now we don't even bother with that.

Insider trading in the US is more about misappropriating information that belong to a party you have fiduciary duties to, not so much about harm to the public. For example, imagine you are working for Warren Buffet and you learn that he has quietly bought some stocks and next weeks he's going to announce that. Assume that this announcement will reliably make the stock trade up. If you trade on that information, that'…

Insider trading around Warren Buffett seems like a really odd example. More typical would be company employees knowing the quarterly results before they are published. And there, it's easy to see how the law is protecting the public by leveling the playing field.

Re: $70M in 60 Seconds: How Insider Info Helped Someone 28x Their Money

#64

Post by dash2 »

ncann wrote: post #47
huijzer wrote: post #28

Overall the argument by the author is very convincing and well put. One part I don’t fully agree with is > If the trades hadn’t worked out, the losses would have been swift and total. Zero-day options don’t forgive bad timing. The entire $2.5 million could have evaporated by the close of trading. Even with SPY shares, any unexpected reversal would have meant millions in losses. This has exactly been Taleb’s strategy.…

> So I would like some data about whether similar options were bought on other days in similar volumes. The volumes are there for all to see and the answer is no.

Could you do the rest of us a favour who don't know how to look up volumes on spy options, and post a link?

Re: $70M in 60 Seconds: How Insider Info Helped Someone 28x Their Money

#67

Post by hello_computer »

miohtama wrote: post #34
random3 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Delete along with publicly traded companies, or what’s the plan?

Socialism. Worked well in the past (:

You can have a market economy without immortal corporations. This is something Quigley pointed out a long time ago. The varieties of persona ficta we have created is unlike anything in history. Even the old British charters were limited in terms of either duration, operations, or both. Modern corporations can do whatever they want for as long as they want. They are mostly insulated from criminal law. An individual poisons the town, he gets the lynch mob. A team of executives poisons the town (after days/weeks of cool deliberation), they get bonuses.

Re: $70M in 60 Seconds: How Insider Info Helped Someone 28x Their Money

#68

Post by miohtama »

LeafItAlone wrote: post #58
miohtama wrote: post #36

Inside trading on political information is legal in the US. Nancy Pelosi (Democrat) made this famous in last decade, hitting news headlines with it: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/nancy-pelosi-outperformed-nea... https://nypost.com/2024/09/27/us-news/trump-calls-for-nancy-... Inside trading rules concern only leaking corporate-private insider information.

By Nancy Pelosi, you actually mean her husband. And if you look at the trades, you’ll learn the biggest secret on Wall Street: make long term bets on tech and you’ll get richer. Don’t tell anyone I told you.

Family members are often indicated in insider information tradesm they are still trading on insider information when if they are not part of the decision making process themselves. Both leaker and utiliser are responsible.

In the case of Pelosi, she became so famous about this that there are various Nancy Pelosi stock trackers now.

Re: $70M in 60 Seconds: How Insider Info Helped Someone 28x Their Money

#69

Post by hello_computer »

aetherspawn wrote: post #11

The stock market needs to just be deleted. It’s the insider trading scam machine of the rich class. The whole goal of the stock market is to come up with information that people don’t generally have (insider trading) either from research, or secret info, so you can dupe everyone else’s money.

The brilliant thing is that they have woven it deep into the retirement ponzi-schemes, so nothing short of a cataclysm will unwind it.

There is also the Machiavellian consideration of external threats. We need these corporations to make the tools of Ahriman. Without them, another country's corporations will make them first, and use them to subjugate us. People who believe in God (not just the Abrahamic one, but any good creator) prefer not to play this game, but most people are strict materialists, so they are locked into this equation.

Re: $70M in 60 Seconds: How Insider Info Helped Someone 28x Their Money

#70

Post by aetherspawn »

random3 wrote: post #29
aetherspawn wrote: post #11

The stock market needs to just be deleted. It’s the insider trading scam machine of the rich class. The whole goal of the stock market is to come up with information that people don’t generally have (insider trading) either from research, or secret info, so you can dupe everyone else’s money.

Delete along with publicly traded companies, or what’s the plan?

It makes sense to allow public investment in companies, but base it off (regulated) external valuation rather than real time supply/demand.

Have a limit on how frequently a company can get revalued (months).

Do everything possible to make it a long term investment tool and not something that can be easily gamed. This is also less stressful for the individual investor — most people I know who trade stocks also check the stocks 10+ times per day and it occupies such a large area of their headspace.

Post reply on HN