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Twilio employees, associates charged with insider trading by SEC
121–130 of 302 posts
Re: Twilio employees, associates charged with insider trading by SEC
#122Earlier quoted context omitted.
not a lawyer, but inaction should never be criminalized.
Unfortunately it commonly is. One example is mandatory reporters. For some licensed professions, it is a thought crime to merely have the thought that you suspect a child meets some criteria of neglect/abuse, while not performing any action to relay the thought to authorities. This can lead to unwarranted and damaging/traumatic CPS investigations merely so a professional can cover their ass.
This can also lead to highly warranted investigations, given that actual abuse is incredibly common.
Re: Twilio employees, associates charged with insider trading by SEC
#123What a lame way to insider trade. I thought that instance of the Capital One analysts using internal database queries to understand which retailers were having good quarters was far more interesting and insidious. Similarly you could imagine a lot more subtle ways to leverage insider Twilio information (count of verification texts sent by client?) to make far more obscure bets. The SEC definitely takes a look at anyo…
Yea, now just imagine how many smarter people are doing it and getting away with it
Re: Twilio employees, associates charged with insider trading by SEC
#124Earlier quoted context omitted.
It depends on your definition of the problem. The problem I would like to solve is ensuring that everyone perceives the market as fair, i.e., not tilted toward parties with access to privileged information.
This implies a truly bizarre understanding of markets and fairness. Was it fair when Enron was valued at $70B? Would the situation have been less fair had insider traders with more information pushed the prices down earlier? Insider trading doesn’t cost anybody anything, it simply allows for more accurate pricing which benefits everybody.
That's an interesting perspective. So in a way, insider trading corrects the market because the difference between what is known and what is unknown should not result in a vast difference in valuation.
Re: Twilio employees, associates charged with insider trading by SEC
#125Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I'm sure the SEC has an array of tools with which to comb through the data They have a fairly robust analytics/data science team, and will also act on referrals from FINRA related to suspicious/anomalous trade activity.
isn’t this what they use Palantir for?
Re: Twilio employees, associates charged with insider trading by SEC
#126I work in billing software for a publicly traded software company and this is a constant temptation. I'm never gonna do it because I'm not gonna blow up my career for a relative pittance, but I can't tell you how many times I've been annoyed that I couldn't act on private information and make ~$100k or so. These guys are like the kids who saw the Tide Pod challenges and decided to actually eat the pods. I bet insider…
>I bet insider trading is not as fun when you're unemployed and bankrupt. Not just unemployed, likely unemployable by any reputable company in the industry. Also, good on you for having integrity, but honestly what you say is too much for the average person to be tempted with. Does anyone have a solution for lowering that temptation and making these scenarios less likely?
> but honestly what you say is too much for the average person to be tempted with.
I think you underestimate the “average person”. Most people basically want to be good. Everything works better when that is the case — basic game theory.
You see the punishment / pressure about unfairness start in early childhood. You see it in the infrastructure where this is overwhelmingly the case (e.g. shops with unguarded back entrance/exits) vs where not (armed guards outside the shops).
And of course the news (cf the current HN conversation on that topic) focuses on the exceptions to the rules because, on an evolutionary biology* basis we’re always learning and reinforcing on the normal case so we are interested in the exceptions.
* meant loosely…most EB is fanciful.
Re: Twilio employees, associates charged with insider trading by SEC
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
Legalising insider trading is the simplest solution.
Indeed, insider trading benefits everybody by adding more information to the markets, leading to more accurate prices.
To people disagreeing with this, can you give a counter argument? On face value, what rosndo said seems to make sense.
Re: Twilio employees, associates charged with insider trading by SEC
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
isn’t this what they use Palantir for?
Palantir doesn’t have a product that actually does this, contrary to whatever sales presentation you might’ve heard. (I know someone whose gov org almost found this out the hard way after nearly flushing millions of taxpayer dollars down the toilet)
None of Palantir's products do anything really useful. They are instead used as glorified tech demos by their sales teams. Then their engineers go in and build custom solutions for whatever the client needs. The company doesn't do too much more than standard tech consulting.
Re: Twilio employees, associates charged with insider trading by SEC
#129I work in billing software for a publicly traded software company and this is a constant temptation. I'm never gonna do it because I'm not gonna blow up my career for a relative pittance, but I can't tell you how many times I've been annoyed that I couldn't act on private information and make ~$100k or so. These guys are like the kids who saw the Tide Pod challenges and decided to actually eat the pods. I bet insider…
Quoted post unavailable.
False.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consumption_of_Tide_Pods
Do not eat!!
Re: Twilio employees, associates charged with insider trading by SEC
#130Earlier quoted context omitted.
This implies a truly bizarre understanding of markets and fairness. Was it fair when Enron was valued at $70B? Would the situation have been less fair had insider traders with more information pushed the prices down earlier? Insider trading doesn’t cost anybody anything, it simply allows for more accurate pricing which benefits everybody.
That's an interesting perspective. So in a way, insider trading corrects the market because the difference between what is known and what is unknown should not result in a vast difference in valuation.
Exactly. It is the perspective often repeated by economists.
There exists little political will to legalize insider trading because it would be hard to sell to a public that doesn’t even understand why stock markets exist. To the average person on “insider trading” is just bad stuff evil rich people on wall street do.
In reality the arguments in favor of banning insider trading are actually quite weak, usually relying on very vague ideas of fairness and public perception.
But the idea of “fairness” in markets is an illusion anyway, even without insider trading there will always be those with more information. Someone could follow corporate executives to restaurants, eavesdrop on their conversations and trade on that basis. That wouldn’t be illegal insider trading, would it be fair? I personally believe it would be just as fair as illegal insider trading.