131–140 of 227 posts
Hmm. So a rouge Meta employee could put a barometric pressure monitor in Messenger or WhatsApp (that people use even without paid in-flight wifi) to detect depressurization and automatically short the airline and aircraft manufacturer.
This is a good opportunity to point out that insider trading is a victimless crime. If you sell stock with insider knowledge, you sell it to someone who would have happily bought it at the same price or possibly a higher price from someone else anyway. The same is true if you buy stock with insider knowledge. The only net effect of insider trading is to make the market more efficient by pricing in otherwise inaccessi…
> This is a good opportunity to point out that insider trading is a victimless crime. It is a "victimless crime" in the same sense as selling someone a house is, fully knowing that a pipe in the basement is going to burst 6-12 months later and not disclosing it to the buyer (which would've made the house value go down, if the buyer knew it). That "someone who would have happily bought it at the same price or possibly…
Of course not, because you learned the information yourself as an outsider. Just like the hedge funds that pay for satellite images of all of the WalMart parking lots in the country and count the cars to estimate year over year sales. It's information they have that no one else does, but they didn't get it from an insider.
If members of Congress can make millions trading on info they get from sitting on key committees, then trading based on your first hand experience certainly should be ok.
Whatever is ok for congressman could not be ok for you.
IANAL, but I don't see how. If you're just an ordinary person, you're trading based on an event you witnessed in the course of going about your life. No different I would think than if you witnessed a plane crash. You might be investigated though if the amounts were large enough. It gets much more complicated I would think if you were an air traffic controller or otherwise learned about it in a professional capacity.
>It gets much more complicated I would think if you were an air traffic controller or otherwise learned about it in a professional capacity. IANAL, but I am curious if ATC radio communications are considered public. My understanding is that it is legal to listen to ATC radio; if that's the case, is the plane crashing "public information" right after you relay the info over the radio?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Better question can the flight attendant buy puts? What about the air traffic controller who handled the emergency? It’s the exact same information. This is where insider trading rules just don’t make sense. Here’s a good example. You can buy credit card data from Bloomberg that will give you near accurate information on revenue. For earnings, you can pay to see if a company will meet expectations and trade off that…
>Maybe we should make insider trading, trading off information that isn’t public. This is stupid. It disincentivizes people who make a living externally auditing/investigating companies
Why? Trading implies making stock trades based on non-public information. This has little to do with auditing and investigating, since that information is not necessarily public.
UK rules differ from the US there is a 3-point test for insider trading: 1. The information has to be specific - Yes - you should sell Boeing 2. Would a reasonable investor take this information into account when making a decision to trade - Yes - this seems quite clear 3. The information must be non public - IIRC disclosure to a large group of people - in this case the perhaps 200ish people on the plane knowing it h…
On the third point, what if the plane was privately-owned or chartered?
> On August 15, 2006, it was revealed that Halutz sold off his investment portfolio three hours after two Israeli soldiers were captured by Hezbollah during the Zar'it-Shtula incident, leading to the war. While this action on the part of the chief of staff is technically legal and is only restricted (through blind trusteeship) from cabinet members, the State Comptroller Micha Lindenstrauss has called to expand it to the chief of staff and to other senior officials. Several Knesset members called for Halutz to offer his resignation and some members of the General Staff Forum commented that his resignation appeared inevitable
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_Halutz#Investment_portfoli...