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

Twilio employees, associates charged with insider trading by SEC

sec.gov

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

181–190 of 302 posts

Re: Twilio employees, associates charged with insider trading by SEC

#181

Post by economist6373 »

deObfuscate wrote: post #179
economist6373 wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good enforcement is impossible. You can never meaningfully hinder insider trading, far too many people have access to insider information. They don’t have to make the trades themselves either. > I think it would be dishonest to do so actively That is what the government is doing via legislation.

Good enforcement isnt impossible. Improbable, yes. Every trade has to be disclosed. There isn't a block-chain involved, but their is an e-paper trail. We are on a technology forum in a time where ten people could probably put together a domain model that tracks potential conflicts based on peoples trades, google contacts, and linkedin profile. And any person who traded on insider information in the past probably leav…

Fine, this feels needlessly pedantic but let me correct myself.

Good enforcement is impossible without subjecting anybody trading stocks and everybody they know to a completely unprecedented level of surveillance. This would have to go far beyond the wildest Snowden revelations.

Perhaps not completely impossible in theory, but absolutely infeasible in practice. Building such a system would also be likely to result in far greater chilling effects on the markets than insider trading ever could.

Re: Twilio employees, associates charged with insider trading by SEC

#182

Post by JumpCrisscross »

rosndo wrote: post #54
kieselguhr_kid wrote: post #48

I 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…

> These guys are like the kids who saw the Tide Pod challenges and decided to actually eat the pods. I bet insider trading is not as fun when you're unemployed and bankrupt. Most insider traders are never caught, everyone eating tide pods gets sick.

> Most insider traders are never caught

Executing an inside trade profitably and secretly is difficult. Catching it ex post facto is easy. (The SEC scans for unusually profitable trades and accounts. These systems are thorough, clever and effective. When they're updated, they re-run back data through the statute of limitations.) This is the P != NP element of insider trading that outsiders miss.

It's why inside traders are usually unsophisticated. They assume Wall Street is doing it. That they're getting the short end of the stick. So they run out and buy out of the money calls or whatever through their nephew's account and get nailed.

Re: Twilio employees, associates charged with insider trading by SEC

#183

Post by ffggvv »

stavros wrote: post #158
ffggvv wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

probably or they wouldnt have used telugu. maybe assuming it would be harder to get caught

Why wouldn't they have used their native language in a secure channel?

im saying they probably use it in the internal slack channel assuming it would be less likely to be caught than if they used english

Re: Twilio employees, associates charged with insider trading by SEC

#184

Post by harry8 »

carimura wrote: post #173
paulpauper wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because it's not as obvious regarding congress. Person A gets tip, hands to B and makes trade, is a direct link and can be proven in court. Also, Congress has 532 people, so by statistical certainty we should expect some to beat the market.

Sure but many are beating the market by making trades on companies that those members are supposed to regulate.

Sure but Pelosi, Feinstein etc etc are so very very clever they'd have become multi-millionaires by them & their partners investing in the market if they didn't regulate those companies. /s

Re: Twilio employees, associates charged with insider trading by SEC

#185

Post by throw10920 »

paulpauper wrote: post #164
RspecMAuthortah wrote: post #149

Not a sympathizer of these idiots who clearly thought that would get away. But what really astonishes me is how SEC is consistently after these retail small players when members of congress and its different committees are brazenly involved in insider trading and no one bats an eye. Hell even the Fed itself and its members were involved in trades that could only be explained by insider knowledge. My sense is SEC want…

Because it's not as obvious regarding congress. Person A gets tip, hands to B and makes trade, is a direct link and can be proven in court. Also, Congress has 532 people, so by statistical certainty we should expect some to beat the market.

> Also, Congress has 532 people, so by statistical certainty we should expect some to beat the market.

Congress has many individuals that consistently beat the market by significant margins over a prolonged period of time, far past the point of reasonable arguments that you can make based on statistics.

Re: Twilio employees, associates charged with insider trading by SEC

#186

Post by JumpCrisscross »

CharlesW wrote: post #163
swyx wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

well, for one, members of congress are legally allowed to insider trade. pretty convenient laws when you make the laws.

> well, for one, members of congress are legally allowed to insider trade. Are they? Highlight link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STOCK_Act#:~:text=The%20law%20... .

Spoiler: members of Congress are not allowed to trade on inside information. We haven't yet seen a prosecution, however.

Re: Twilio employees, associates charged with insider trading by SEC

#187

Post by JumpCrisscross »

RspecMAuthortah wrote: post #149

Not a sympathizer of these idiots who clearly thought that would get away. But what really astonishes me is how SEC is consistently after these retail small players when members of congress and its different committees are brazenly involved in insider trading and no one bats an eye. Hell even the Fed itself and its members were involved in trades that could only be explained by insider knowledge. My sense is SEC want…

> even the Fed itself and its members were involved in trades that could only be explained by insider knowledge

What's your source for this? We've seen questionably-timed broad-market transactions that yielded a few points. (The officials were fired and the Fed revised its rules.) But nothing that looks like insider trading.

The simple answer may be more mundane. Anyone who has spent time on Wall Street or in rule making knows how effective the SEC's systems are at catching insider trades ex post facto. The only seeming way around it is to avoid letting your trades get too profitable. At which point the risk-reward ratio becomes unattractive for anyone with much to lose.

Re: Twilio employees, associates charged with insider trading by SEC

#188

Post by thedz »

tlb wrote: post #175

This seems surprisingly far down the list of what SEC's priorities should be. A million dollar fraud when there are almost certainly billion dollar frauds ongoing. One theory for going after small fish is that fraudsters often start small and get bigger and more sophisticated (and harder to catch). Therefore, it's good to nail them early and signal to other junior fraudsters that they're not underneath the radar. It'…

i think there's also a fallacy there that you can't work on billion dollar cases while also pursuing million dollar ones

even if they were the same people, relatively simple cases like this probably helps provide some sense of closure while the big fish are being hunted

Re: Twilio employees, associates charged with insider trading by SEC

#189

Post by joering2 »

harry8 wrote: post #184
carimura wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure but many are beating the market by making trades on companies that those members are supposed to regulate.

Sure but Pelosi, Feinstein etc etc are so very very clever they'd have become multi-millionaires by them & their partners investing in the market if they didn't regulate those companies. /s

Case of Pelosi comes so often but she is a very weak example. Came from $300,000,000 family fortune "her" stock picks (she obviously doesn't pick herself but has financial firm representing and making moves on her behalf) did merely $6,000,000 in last 10 years, according to her tax statements. I don't get why her "inside trading" and her fridge full of ice-cream triggers so many people; people who clearly haven't done a basic research.

Re: Twilio employees, associates charged with insider trading by SEC

#190

Post by JumpCrisscross »

throw10920 wrote: post #185
paulpauper wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because it's not as obvious regarding congress. Person A gets tip, hands to B and makes trade, is a direct link and can be proven in court. Also, Congress has 532 people, so by statistical certainty we should expect some to beat the market.

> Also, Congress has 532 people, so by statistical certainty we should expect some to beat the market. Congress has many individuals that consistently beat the market by significant margins over a prolonged period of time, far past the point of reasonable arguments that you can make based on statistics.

"We find weak evidence of informed trading for the pre-Congress period, suggesting that informed traders are not being selected into office. When combined with our finding that the portfolios of members serving on powerful committees outperform the market during their second term in office, this provides additional evidence that serving on influential committees is the mechanism by which members of Congress earn abnormal returns."

http://busecon.wvu.edu/phd_economics/pdf/16-25.pdf

Post reply on HN