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

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

#122
post #9

[flagged]

Let's not play that game please.

We don't even know who made these trades.

If we look at actual trades by politicians who actually sit on committees with tradable information, we know the biggest culprits are on both sides of the aisle.

https://newrepublic.com/post/177806/members-congress-made-st...

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

#124
post #117
post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

there's no reason that one government should control that currency.

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

#125
I'd be more interested to see the other side of this trade and how many options were purchase that didn't pay out.

People buy options all the time, sometimes without any insider information, people buy options that happen to just perfectly line up with major market moving events.

Look at 9/11, there were several trades made right before the planes hit that paid out big time. The SEC investigated and found no evidence of insider information.

https://govinfo.library.unt.edu/911/hearings/hearing1/witnes...

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

#126
post #43

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'…

>That's an illustration that insider trading law in the US is not supposed to protect the public.

From [0]: >Because insider trading undermines investor confidence in the fairness and integrity of the securities markets, the SEC has treated the detection and prosecution of insider trading violations as one of its enforcement priorities.

So it _kinda_ is supposed to protect the public.

0. https://www.investor.gov/introduction-investing/investing-ba...

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

#127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Isn't it literally all included in this umbrella section?

> Friends, business associates, family members, and other "tippees" of such officers, directors, and employees, who traded the securities after receiving such information;

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

#128

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…

Maybe all the insider trading going on is part of why the chances for regular investors to beat the market are so slim.

I doubt it.. I suspect that most of us would trade just as poorly if we knew Q results ahead of the announcement :)

Because it maybe up a bit or down a bit, but that's all going to measured relative to assumptions the market has and those assumptions aren't public either.

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

#129

404 Media reported a story on Monday[1] about a news outlet that claimed there'd be a 90-day break on tariffs for all countries besides China. This was published a few days before the official announcement. So someone, somewhere, knew something before everyone else. [1] https://www.404media.co/benzinga-news-service-that-falsely-r...

Good cover: publicly release a rumor via a random tiny outlet (along with a flurry of other rumors). Then if questioned, just say you heard it there.
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