Not related, but required to fully underarms how different this case is. Defendant wasnt given insider information, and prosecution accepts this as true. He kept being told he was doing a project for another company, but he slowly figured out that was fabricated story and correctly deduced it was for his own, Equifax.
This is such a borderline and interesting case. I would definitely have preferred a not guilty verdict since this decision unbound what can be considered as insider information. It has the potential to make it very difficult for employees to trade their stock even when not told insider info, but then just being smart.
The bar for having insider information is not that it was handed to you or spoken/emailed and noted as insider info, but rather that you merely have it without regard to how much intelligence or effort you applied.
This is in contrast to an outsider who can use a wide variety of means to synthesize material, non-public conclusions without falling afoul of insider trading laws. (Traffic counts, parking lot surveillance, deducing order flow from order IDs that a company might be leaking, etc. If a company insider argues that they did it that way, they’re likely to lose.)
In this case, once Ying correctly deduces that Equifax is the company involved, he needs to block himself from trading and, if he has a question about his eligibility to trade, to seek personal counsel and/or the advise of his compliance officer.
> The bar for having insider information is not that it was handed to you or spoken/emailed and noted as insider info, but rather that you merely have it without regard to how much intelligence or effort you applied.
To be fair, your linked summary neither confirms nor denies that it's the proverbial bar -- though I'd love to see a citation on what the actual 'test' is.
Without knowing all of the pertinent facts of the linked case, it's hard to say how applicable it might or might not be. The summary does certainly exhibit similarities though civil settlement was at least partially reached, in addition to an acquittal, it seems.
Exactly. OJ Simpson was found not guilty criminally and still ordered to pay a large civil settlement. I don't think that creates a notion that murder is OK.
> In this case, once Ying correctly deduces that Equifax is the company involved, he needs to block himself from trading and, if he has a question about his eligibility to trade, to seek personal counsel and/or the advise of his compliance officer.
See I think the issue here is that when he made the trade he didn't know that Equifax was the company involved, he just made an educated guess with no confirmation from anyone. The question will be whether the pieces of the puzzle he did have access to were "material non-public information" or was it only that he guessed correctly (if he was later shown to be correct but didn't know at the time). The reporting makes it seem like the project was well known to non-insiders so its questionable that just knowing about the project and then guessing can be insider trading.
A lot of stock analysts are worried about the implication of situations where reading a lot about a company, inferring that you expect something might happen, and trading on an educated guess becomes a crime if you're right.
Not related, but required to fully underarms how different this case is. Defendant wasnt given insider information, and prosecution accepts this as true. He kept being told he was doing a project for another company, but he slowly figured out that was fabricated story and correctly deduced it was for his own, Equifax.
This is such a borderline and interesting case. I would definitely have preferred a not guilty verdict since this decision unbound what can be considered as insider information. It has the potential to make it very difficult for employees to trade their stock even when not told insider info, but then just being smart.