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

111–120 of 480 posts

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

#111

Post by johanvts »

delusional wrote: post #99
mullingitover wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No economic system is functional without a bunch of compromises, and capitalism needs strong regulations as a check to keep it from turning absolutely rotten. We're witnessing the removal of all of the guardrails, traffic signals, road maintenance crews. The highway patrols have been replaced by organized teams of highwaymen. It'll get a lot worse before it gets better.

> It'll get a lot worse before it gets better. Importantly, there's no guarantee it's actually going to get better. We like to pretend that human existence has some trajectory towards "justice" or "prosperity". I don't think that impulse does us justice. Stalin/Lenin could have won. Hitler could have won, Napoleon could have conquered and held. It could just get worse.

Oppression and corruption is expensive. Systems based on them are not going to be competitive in the long run.

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

#112

Post by cft »

radicalbyte wrote: post #98
rapnie wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not just sad to watch . Would a country with a low-trust business environment be allowed to have such a huge mountain of government debt, and continue to have its currency be the world's reserve currency? A lot of sadness hinges on those considerations.

I'm pretty sure that the damage is done. It will take a few years, maybe even a decade, but the USD will no longer be the defacto reserve currency.

there's no reason for the USD to be the reserve currency, being the currency of a country that doesn't produce anything anymore

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

#113

Post by wahern »

vanviegen wrote: post #63
eru wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Technically the law is protecting the share holders. Legal scholars, regulators, and even judges have continually tried to push the fraud-on-the-market theory of insider trading, but IIRC it's been firmly rejected by SCOTUS multiple times. There are statutes where the fraud-on-the-market principal pertains, but for your typical insider trading case predicated on Securities Exchange Act jurisprudence, it doesn't fly. Courts have said it would sweep far too broadly and significantly expand the scope of criminal liability (e.g. end up in prison for trading on something you overheard at the coffee shop). As insider trading law has been largely constructed by the courts (the statute its rooted in says nothing about "insider trading"), Congress would have to be explicit about a further expansion of criminal liability.

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

#114

Post by manuelfcreis »

maxbond wrote: post #105
hdevalence wrote: post #3

> We don’t know who placed the trades. We don’t know what they knew. Actually, “we”, collectively, do know, because the SEC maintains an “XKEYSCORE for equities” called CAT. If there was interest, the government could know exactly who placed these trades. But the call (options) are coming from inside the house.

Is this really SEC's bailiwick? Aren't options commodities (and so regulated by CFTC)?

Neither! Options are derivatives, which are also regulated by the CFTC

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

#115

Post by jaza »

Surely the number one suspect for having made this trade, is Trump himself (and/or his immediately family)? Nobody knew better exactly what would be announced and when, than the guy who did the announcing. Ownership could be hidden behind trust / shell structures, possibly indefinitely, or at least until it's too late for anyone to do anything about it (although in Trump's America, I doubt that anyone could do anything about it anyway). We already know that he's unscrupulous and unprincipled. We already know that he's an indicted felon.

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

#117

Post by dlkmp »

cft wrote: post #112
radicalbyte wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm pretty sure that the damage is done. It will take a few years, maybe even a decade, but the USD will no longer be the defacto reserve currency.

there's no reason for the USD to be the reserve currency, being the currency of a country that doesn't produce anything anymore

But does provide services the entire world depends on.

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

#118

Post by PaulRobinson »

wiseowise wrote: post #78

Wake me up when orange gets impeached.

He's a 2x impeached convicted felon.

He told everyone what he was going to do. A lot of people thought he was a lying politician who lies, and therefore these were all lies. Or, at best, jokes or exaggerations.

And now, 4 months into a 4 year term, he's doing it all. Who knew?

So when he jokes that he can do whatever he wants, including run for a third term, learn from the past: it isn't a joke, even if he's chuckling; it isn't an exaggeration; it's not a lie. It's real, it's the plan. Decide how you feel about it.

I'm not criticising anyone or anything here, I'm just stating facts. It's sad to me that so many people think this is all coming as some sort of huge surprise.

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

#119

Post by LeafItAlone »

nramanand wrote: post #109
LeafItAlone wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

I agree with you that it's possibly unanswerable, which is more or less the point. The broader idea is that there are lots of obscure interactions like that one I made up. You can switch up the doctor and CEO patient for anything else. Bankers, lenders, family friends, former professors ... An unbounded number of humans that can come into contact with useful info to trade on. What do we think are the magical constrai…

But nearly all of that isn’t going to be actual insider trader, which is pretty narrowly defined: https://www.investor.gov/introduction-investing/investing-ba...

That would be like saying there are 300 million peanut butter and marshmallow fluff sandwiches eaten a year because that’s the total number of sandwiches made in a year. https://www.ezcater.com/lunchrush/office/state-of-the-sandwi...

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

#120

Post by sorokod »

svg7 wrote: post #19

While I have no doubt that insider trading happens quite regularly, I would not jump to that conclusion here. IIRC the previous day, big Wall street names were advocating for a pause in tariffs . So a lot of people placed bets accordingly. Also staking 2.5M is "small change" for true insiders.

Could a test run by "very rich insiders". To gauge the system's reaction before the next one, possibly a deal with China.
Post reply on HN