Badin Rungruangnavarat was very lucky. He invested a bunch of cash from May 21 to May 28. When the market closed on May 29 he had unrealized gains of over $3 million and had achieved a return in excess of 3000%. Now he is unlucky because the Securities and Exchange Commission froze his investment gain … Read more »
Category: Insider Trading
Challenging the SEC on the New Five Year Limit
It didn’t take long for defendants to take advantage of the Gabelli decision. That Supreme Court decision enforced the strict five year statute of limitations on enforcement actions by the Securities and Exchange Commission. The SEC is not entitled to the “discovery rule” which would have allowed the SEC’s five-year time bar to start … Read more »
A Little Extra Ketchup on It
Warren buffet loves ketchup, and with his $23 billion acquisition of Heinz, he may love it even more. Apparently someone found out about the flow of ketchup before the deal was announced and profited handsomely on that knowledge. The Securities and Exchange Commission brought an emergency case when they discovered an astonishingly accurate trade that … Read more »
Phone Calls Can Get You Caught Insider Trading
The insider trading prosecution of Raj Rajaratnam was centered around phone calls. Prosecutors were able to get a recording of those calls. Can you get a conviction merely by tying phone calls to trades, without knowing the content of the calls? The Securities and Exchange Commission is hoping that old-fashioned phone call logs will be … Read more »
Airport Use as Illegal Inside Information
I’m a bit confused by the big story in Bloomberg about David Slaine, a key informant for the recent crackdown on insider trading. It starts off with Slaine trying to claim that a money manager was illegally using airplane flight information into Teterboro Airport to profit on stocks. The claim was that his tipsters would … Read more »
How to Get Caught Insider Trading
Thomas C. Conradt and David J. Weishaus were brokers at Euro Pacific Capital when they came across a golden source of information. IBM was getting ready to purchase SPSS, Inc. for $50 per share. Now the SEC is charging them with illegally trading on that inside information. Both are challenging the complaint, so we will … Read more »
Now We are Talking About Real Money – SEC Brings $250 Million Insider Trading Case
On Tuesday, the Securities and Exchange Commission released news of an alleged insider-trading scheme that reaped profits and avoided losses of more than $276 million. The SEC brought the charges against (1) CR Intrinsic Investors LLC, (2) its former portfolio manager, Mathew Martoma, and (3) a medical consultant for an expert network firm, Dr. Sidney … Read more »
No Language Barrier to Prosecuting Insider Trading
The Securities and Exchange Commission alleges that Waldyr Da Silva Prado Neto, a citizen of Brazil who was working for Wells Fargo in Miami, learned about an impending acquisition and profited illegally from insider information. The SEC was apparently undeterred by the language barrier in filing its action. The SEC claims that Prado, while a … Read more »
Insider Trading is a Victimless Crime (?)
Dilbert September 13, 2012 Read more »
Don’t Trade Stock in Your Friend’s Company, Illegally
Ladislav “Larry” Schvacho purchased approximately 72,000 shares of Comsys IT Partners, Inc. stock between November 9, 2009 and February 1, 2010. On February 2, 2010, Manpower, Inc. and Comsys publicly announced a merger, resulting in a 31% percent increase in the share price of Comsys from its prior day’s close. As a result of his trading … Read more »