YHK - yet another hacker news clone

The insider trading you're allowed to do

42 points rohanm93 3 hours ago 23 comments

sixtyj 2 hours ago | parent

This is not an “insider trading”, it is an insider’s knowledge (affinity to knowledge) and ability to use it.

bananaflag 1 hour ago | parent

Also see the famous case of

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dave_Mustaine

who left Metallica to found Megadeth.

elvircrn 1 hour ago | parent

Completely unrelated to the article claims.

pipes 1 hour ago | parent

Genuine question, what inside info did he have?

Also

"Initial drummer Carruthers was replaced after Mustaine and Ellefson decided they could not trust him. Carruthers had chosen to hide his black heritage from them by claiming he was Spanish, and they could not understand why he would deceive them.Brett Frederickson joined the band in November 1983 as their next drummer."

That move probably hasn't aged well. Pretty nasty.

Edit: I can't recall which podcast I heard this, but ismtbhebthe guy that was sad that his band didn't sell as many records as Metallica?

stavros 23 minutes ago | parent

I don't understand what happened, he hid the fact that he was black from them, they couldn't understand why he'd hide it, and they fired him? Isn't this kind of exactly why he'd hide it from them?

ang_cire 19 minutes ago | parent

Yeah, especially given what we know about Metallica now.

pipes 18 minutes ago | parent

What do we know about Metallica?

yawaramin 1 hour ago | parent

Actually, the real legal insider trading is the trades that you _don’t_ place based on insider knowledge. Eg, if you know that the iPhone is years ahead of everything else and you happen to be holding Apple stock, then you won’t let whoever is managing your portfolio sell any of it when otherwise you may not have cared. There’s no way to prove illegality for _not_ placing a trade.

dumberquestions 1 hour ago | parent

There should be a name for this cognitive bias, not accounting for what someone is not doing.

thereader12 16 minutes ago | parent

It just isn't provable, I think it it is technically illegal.

rendaw 8 minutes ago | parent

Holding stock knowing it might go up is illegal? I don't think that's technically illegal.

Havoc 1 hour ago | parent

Unfortunately doesn't work that smoothly everywhere because outcomes are often tied to larger unknowns whether it is will AI bubble pop or will the global economy take a dip.

Access to internal data isn't a crystal ball

yieldcrv 1 hour ago | parent

I read the article and I’m far more interested in talking about actual legal insider trading in the equities market

You may not be able to trade your company’s stock, or a competitor’s if you have knowledge that was under an employer agreement, but you can trade your sector and correlated assets

You can have an edge, it’s not a legal issue.

graemep 47 minutes ago | parent

I assume you mean things like trade secrets that you cannot disclose? That is legal because it is not information that is confidential the same way as say financial results are. It is confidential, but for different reasons. It also tends to be much more long term information so people cannot make a quick profit from it. Its also impractical to regulate.

toppa33 1 hour ago | parent

Good article. I feel this way about my job :/

harporoeder 57 minutes ago | parent

There are explicit insider trading forms such as SEC forms 3, 4, and 5. Insiders are allowed to trade as long as it is declared to the government. The issue is with trading while having material non public information. Frequently trades are executed on an explicit schedule with rule 10b5-1 to act as a defense against accusations of trading on MNPI.

cucumber3732842 36 minutes ago | parent

On the flip side, even if the company is on the way up and you're on some team that's at the center of it and you'll never benefit from it if your manager doesn't like you. All the opportunity to do all the things that lead toward career growth and compensation will go to other people.

elil17 31 minutes ago | parent

How many people think this way, jump ship, and end up being wrong?

fai5a1 21 minutes ago | parent

This is information asymmetry. The nokia engineers knew something that the rest of the world didn't and were able to use it to their advantage.

In any transaction if you know less than the other party, you're at a disadvantage. I was just thinking this morning I could've negotiated a much higher comp for my current job if I knew just some of things about the company I know now.

kasey_junk 16 minutes ago | parent

This is a bad analogy because it perpetuates a misconception of the basis of insider trading law (in the US).

Insider trading has nothing to do with having an information advantage. The markets and their regulators encourage those with an information advantage to use it to as full advantage as they can.

Insider trading is based on having an economic obligation to someone else. If you use your knowledge to make money and you don’t share that equitably with the people you have that obligation to, that’s insider trading (in the US).

You’d have to torture that definition for it to make sense in the job market and none of the examples in the article match.

paulbjensen 14 minutes ago | parent

I watched "Enron: The smartest guys in the room" documentary, and I think Lou Pai is the most fascinating character in the story.

As quoted online:

Lou Pai was a senior executive at Enron who, after having an affair with a stripper, to satisfy his divorce settlement, cashed out $250 million of his Enron stock just before the company's stock price collapsed and it filed for bankruptcy protection.

I don't know if he ever knew about the stuff that was going down at Enron, but that guy managed to leave the ship in a nice boat before it sank.

NoboruWataya 11 minutes ago | parent

Knowing that a new competitor has entered the market with a superior product is not inside information. The iPhone was public knowledge (that is how the Nokia engineers, who were not Apple insiders, knew about it). Nokia's existing offering was also public knowledge. Sure, some members of the public might have speculated that maybe Nokia was about to respond with its own killer smartphone, and Nokia insiders knew that wasn't the case. But that's not concrete information. Not to mention that "we can't compete with Apple" is ultimately a matter of opinion/prediction, not concrete information.

This has nothing to do with inside information or insider trading, it is just "if your company is bad, maybe you should go work for a better company".

Also it reeks of AI.